


Double Vision

by Nyaow



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Female Will Graham, Gen, Genderswap, Hospitalization, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Seizures, Someone Helps Will Graham, Vegetarians & Vegans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 00:33:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyaow/pseuds/Nyaow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham knows they're only this protective of her because she's a woman. Most days she works too hard at holding together her fractured sanity to be offended. And as it turns, it's also remarkably useful when you're accused of murder and no one even thinks to believe you did it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Vision

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is going to sound strange, but the general background matter of Hannibal terrifies me. A friend of mine watched it, said it dealt more with the psychology than what I originally thought it was a kind of offered to "help me watch it," so I only had the first episode explained to me and had to randomly skip two scenes in a few other episodes. I quite legitimately have no idea how my friend convinced me to watch this, but I'm so glad I did. 
> 
> But basically what I'm getting at is that I'm not getting particularly explicit with Hannibal's MO. 
> 
> Also! This story came about through a discussion with a different friend about how differently the series would have gone had Will been a girl because gender stereotypes and whatnot. So, yeah, this probably won't be read, but I thought I should give it a shot anyway.
> 
> Random parts have dialogue taken directly from the episodes, but it's not consistent. Goes almost completely off starting what would be episode twelve.

When she analyzes a killer, she faces not a person but a mirror where inside she plays the scene's starring role. Today she shoots her reflection ten times. A girl bleeds out from her neck on the floor, blood lapping at the broken glass that catches the image of a pair of old Payless shoes.

Then the reflection shatters, and she's staring down the dead eyes of Garrett Jacob Hobbs. 

 

-

 

Will's full name is Wilhelmina Emilie Graham, a curse given to her by a grandmother she never met that followed her throughout grade school until she was smart enough to ignore the offhand comments and tell her teacher ever year, It’s just Will. At thirty-one, she's five two, not allowed to weigh herself according to her last attempted psychiatrist and therefore owns no scale, and has freckles and blue eyes and brown hair with natural curls she keeps long and off her face for practicality. She likes dogs because they're better company than humans - less judgmental, don't complain about her eating habits or if she takes her migraine medication too often in one day.

But these are just the broad strokes, the consistencies with her day after day, built into her stuffing (white fluff or downy feathers or broken glass and Dad used to call her his little Raggedy Will). This is, instead, the present where the world shifts under her feet:

Dr. Hannibal Lecter rubberstamps her and she walks far above him on a balcony surrounded by books of psychiatric fluff and high enough that she could break her neck at the perfect angle if she took a tumble off the latter. "Jack Crawford can lay his weary head to rest knowing he didn't break you," Dr. Lecter says, looking up at her where she paces so high above him, and looking down is not a sensation she's used to, "and our conversation can proceed unobstructed by paperwork."

"Jack thinks I need therapy," she says. 

His eyes follow her, but not predatory or threatening or patronizing. Just there. "What you need is a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there."

"Last time he sent me into a dark place, I brought something back."

"A surrogate daughter?" The word  _daughter_ tangles itself inside her; the edges of the letters get caught on the corners of shattered glass. "You saved Abigail Hobbs' life. You also orphaned her. That comes with certain feelings of obligation, regardless of empathy disorders."

The caught edges and corners twist and dig painfully into the insides of her body, melding with words like  _mother_ and  _emotional abandonment_. It's Es and Rs that hurt the worst. "What about you?" she asks. "You were there. Do you feel a certain amount of  _obligation?_ "

Keeping his eyes steady, he answers, "Yes. I feel a staggering amount of obligation. I feel responsibility. I fantasized about scenarios where my actions may have allowed a different fate for Abigail Hobbs."

There's a lot she can say, and a lot she doesn't want to say, so she goes with the safe option and sticks with, "Jack thinks Abigail helped her dad kill those girls."

She doesn't tell him she has nightmares where Garrett Jacob Hobbs slits her throat instead of his daughter's. She doesn't tell him this time there were two mirrors, and she was the murderer and the victim.

Life is easier when secrets stay where they belong.

(she keeps hers locked away in a small safe place where even the monsters can't find them)

 

-

 

Today is a good day, so she feels safe practicing at the firing range. She's not particularly surprised that one of Jack's team finds her down here, though she appreciates that it's Katz over Price or Zeller. Apparently today is even a good enough day for the other woman to sneak a smile out of her. 

"I was stabbed," Will tells her when she goes to correct her stance.

Katz ignores her, just says, "Yeah, I was stabbed in the third grade with a number two pencil. Thought I was going to get lead poisoning," and presses close enough to get her hands on her. Will has never liked touching, her own bad experiences mixing dangerously with others' bad experiences and she feels enough from a person only a short distance away, but it's easier with women than it is with men. 

"No lead in pencils," she says, though she's not being serious. "Just graphite."

She catches the hint of a smile out of the corner of her eye and she'd forgotten she knew how to make people do that genuinely. Katz tells her to see if it helps with the recoil and it does. "No," she says, though, quite honest upon direct questioning on why she's really downstairs. "Jack's wondering what you know about gardening."

Today is a good day, Will reminds herself. "I guess we better go find out," she answers, which sounds stupid even to herself because she isn't distracted but Katz just smiles in that endearing sort of way again and leads her outside. 

 

-

 

First, she is a murderer who kills for corpse-grown fungi burying Garrett Jacob Hobbs' in a shallow grave. She throws dirt over the body in bigger shovel-fulls than she can outside this murderer's mind and talks herself through his process. His milky eyes stare up blankly at her, and gradually the form shifts into her own. She does not stop her movement (for she is a killer too, ten bullets to the chest in front of his dying daughter, no innocent person does that). This killer never faltered, so neither does she.

This is her design.

Then, the neck of the body splits of its own accord, its mouth opening in a bloody gasp as mushrooms begin to bloom from its fingertips. She was Hobbs and now she's Abigail, murderer to victim in a half second flat, seam of her Raggedy Will body coming undone and reforming. Like that, she regains reality.

And like that, the hand of a decaying, dying man finds her wrist. Her chest seizes and the air crackles with fear and pain and -

"JACK!"

But he and the forensics team are already there, gently removing the fingers from her wrist and pulling her away. She sees a flash of rotted lips, vegetation, a faceless killer transforming into herself in an uncovered grave. Some local sighs, says,  _This is what they get for having a_ woman  _as their consultant_ and she registers little.

Zeller is there while Jack takes care of business and an ambulance takes the decaying body away, bottle of water grasped in his hand. He takes her arm, pours it over the fertilized dirt that really did make her a victim, too, and cleans it off. But it's there now, under her skin; like Abigail, like her father, like these victims, like this unidentified killer, like her reflection in the shattered mirror she broke with ten bullets. Jack calls out, "Price, Katz, get your asses over here now!"

Most likely he needs Zeller too and if Will wasn't a woman, none of them would be this protective. They would trust her to take care of herself. Perhaps she should care because today had been a good today, but she was comatose and buried alive and releases the worry into the breeze. The wind does its job and takes it far, far away.  

 

-

 

Despite her misgivings about therapy, she tells Dr. Lecter about seeing Hobbs and then seeing herself. He makes up a term, hands it to her like an adult to a child at the door during a Halloween she never celebrated as a kid or dressed up for past a single night in college

(where she learned layers are safer than form fitting clothes and even sober she's at risk; men don't care about ugliness as long as the body is weak and pliable under larger hands)

she never repeated again.

Double Vision is what he calls it. She became the killer and the victim simultaneously, indentifying too closely with Hobbs' ideal choice because despite her age and diminished height, her hair color and eyes and even body shape are very similar. During the Hobbs' case, she immersed herself too deeply because she killed him and now visits the young girl in the hospital, so her reactions are understandable. They are reactions to stress, and Hobbs in a way was her victim (but he wasn't her victim, not really, just a murderer who was about to kill two people and she did what she needed to save lives).

She's not sure she believes him. At least he doesn't say it's a womanly reaction. The closest he gets to the subject of gender is identification with Abigail and if it were anyone other than her, that could arguably be true.

Before she leaves, she thanks him without explanation. He simply smiles as an answer and she appreciates that he understands what she means even when she doesn't know herself.

 

-

 

Even when they're skeptical and even when her leap and jumps and bounds and nonsensical explanations sound a hop away from unfounded guesswork, Jack's team tends to believe her. She appreciates that, too.

They begin researching pharmacies and Price tells her to keep up the good work. 

 

-

 

[Jack finds Freddie Lounds’ article and sees red. It's a simple consensus by everyone but Will whose opinion doesn't matter at the moment that they need to do something. They find the woman in an apartment, wearing a shirt Bella would call tacky.

A lot of talk about your girl Graham, Lounds says, wrists bound behind her back but still snappy and unafraid, his least favorite kind of person. Not to mention the rivalry for who gets the collar. Local pissing contest with the FBI might have some interest.

This woman's website allowed a murderer to escape, to harvest more bodies and grow his damn mushrooms. Jack doesn't like it when people touch his men and Will Graham might not be official, but that doesn't mean she still isn't one of them.

He puts the fear of God into Freddie Lounds before declaring it safe to leave]

 

-

 

Will's standing on a street in New Orleans, poor as poor can be while still getting by, wearing a threadbare dress bought at the thrift store with a ribbon in her hair as Dad teaches her how to make fishing hooks. It's snowing and a stag stalks their every step and every time she lifts her foot, a new sunflower grows. The seam in her side starts coming undone and she bleeds yellow petals instead of stuffing or blood. Each one is decaying slowly.

When she awakens, Alana is sitting at Abigail's (and it's definitely Abigail Hobbs, not secretly Will with a bandage on her neck and Double Vision makes the world a little hazy) bed, reading her a story. She tells Will she loved this book as a child and once tried to raise peacocks.

The story would be funny if Will still couldn't feel petals against her skin.

(Dr. Lecter is her small, safe place now that the monsters can't reach)

Even so, she manages the slight movement of pulling the blanket up higher when she says, "You know, you could be reading to a killer."

Alana adjusts herself, facing more her than Abigail. "I'm about to approach the takes one to know one article?"

Dear Abby lies there oblivious, answering nor asking any questions, and words and glass cuts harshly somewhere deep inside. Will wonders if the others feel it, too. "Did Jack send you?" she asks.

"No," the other woman answers. "I sent me."

Will doesn't like that. "You know," she says, "I don't think we've ever been alone in a room together."

"I haven't noticed, have we?" Alana says, her mouth doing that half smile thing Will used to do back when she walked barefoot in rural Louisiana before moving to New Orleans and watched her father pull away, towards the boat and the sea and the call of it instead of family and she learned how to raise herself. She was never a neglected child, but no parent deserves to deal with her special brand of crazy. "Not that we're necessarily alone now."

That smile grows to something real and Wills pulls herself into sitting position, back popping, words lodging in her spine.  _Her own demented_   _mind_ , the article read, and it coils into the disks and around the vertebrae. "Yeah, right. Back to Jack Crawford's crime gimp."

"Certainly creates an image. I don't need to talk about it if you don't."

This means they have to talk about it. As she told Jack, she knows all the tricks. "No, we can talk or not talk about whatever you want." Then she tries for a smile of her own. "Actually, I was just enjoying listening to you read." Before he pulled away and realized she wasn't worth the trouble, Dad used to read to her before bed every night.

Alana changes the subject back to Abigail Hobbs and Will feels phantom mushroom begin to spread from her arm.

 

-

 

Dr. Lecter thinks she'd liked killing Garrett Jacob Hobbs.

It's too difficult to explain she thought it was self-defense.

 

-

 

Alana comes to tell her that Abigail woke up from her coma, though Will hadn't even been aware she was actually written down as one of the girl's legitimate guardians to begin with. Her friend (or at least she considers her a friend, though it's difficult tell when the faces in her dream say she has none before the noise of the boat motor comes in too loud and cuts out all other sound) offers to be a buffer between her and Jack so she can see Abigail. "I like you as a buffer," Will tells her, sipping her coffee and tasting computer ink and blood mixed with milk and intended taste. "I also like the fact that you rattle Jack. He respects you far too much to yell at you no matter how much he wants to."

He doesn't yell at Will either, but it has nothing to do with respect. He's just afraid she'll break if he ever raised his voice to her. It's like sometimes he forgets she's not a child, but a grown woman who can make her own decisions.

Even though Alana knows this too, she withholds a comment and instead says, "And I might take advantage of that."

"Abigail Hobbs doesn't have anyone," Will says, not quite paying attention to her words because this is Alana and around Alana she can relax.

Her friend just smiles, half her mouth and lips closed. "You can't be her everyone." Will lets this sink in, realizes she drew together her sentence incorrectly, and Alana continues, "What I said - what I was going to say in my head - it sounded really insulting, so I'm going to find another way to say it -"

By now, Will is immune. Psychiatrists over the years made sure of that as if everyday people weren't bad enough already. "Say it the insulting way."

"Dogs keep a promise a person can't."

(less judgmental, don't complain about her eating habits or if she takes her migraine medication too often in one day)

"I'm not collecting another stray." She looks down before adding, "Besides, I think I trust myself in the role of motherhood even less than you or anyone else does."

"No, that's not what I meant." Alana's words come at a pace that is easy and honest, but Will still thinks that is what she meant. "It's just that whoever Abigail talks to first about what happened can't be anyone who was there when it happens - so that means no Dr. Lecter, either."

"Much less the woman who killed Dad." First she was Hobbs, but Hobbs was a mirror and then she was Abigail bleeding to death on the floor. When she was six-years-old, Will knocked over a ceramic jug holding paintbrushes in art class and a clay shard sliced a thin line in her collarbone. She can't imagine that scared girl with a mouth full of blood making her deathbed kitchen tile helping anyone hunt down murder victims. "Jack is wrong about Abigail," she says.

When Alana says she'll be the one to initiate the first conversation, Will is relieved. If anyone can help set this right, it's her. She does it with everything else already.

 

-

 

Freddie Lounds is wearing a cheetah print skirt and telling Abigail Hobbs that the famous Wilhelmina Graham is crazy when they finally meet each other. "Hi," she says to Abigail and though she originally intended to smile, the motion falls short of actually happening, "I'm Special Agent Will Graham. If you don't mind, I like the shortened version better."

"By Special Agent she means not really an agent. Never got past the screening process. Too unstable," Lounds says (freshman year of high school and Rylee Liney walks down tile floor hallways with click-clacking heels telling anyone who listens that the little Graham Cracker Girl is a lunatic who can read your mind if you get too close and she never did make friends), eyes moving from Abigail to Will, all misplaced malice and power hungry fingers that tap furiously at computer keys. Will has words living inside her, but they're tangled up with glass and stuffing and won't make those neat straight lines.

Lecter steps forward before she can defend herself and maybe that's a good thing because today isn't a good day as much as she needs it to be and she can't monitor her mouth as well as she should. "I really must insist you leave the room," he says. 

"If you want to talk -" Will has the offered business card in her own pocket before Lounds' arm could fully extend. There's a half second look of terror before she exits and if she weren't in heels, they'd be around the same height. 

As she takes off her glasses, Will asks, "Abigail, this is Dr. Lecter. Do you remember us?" 

The girl glances between them before focusing on her. "I remember you," she answers, forehead crinkling as one eyebrow lifts. "You killed my dad."

"You've been in bed for days, Abigail," Lecter says once Will doesn't respond right away. "Why don't we have a walk?"

(Garrett Jacob Hobbs has ten bullets in his chest and his eyes are milky and her neck is bleeding while not bleeding at all as mushrooms grow from her fingertips and she buries him in a shallow grave. The walls makes sounds like they're breaking and she wonders if bloody antlers will push through.

That journalist would have a field day picking at her brain)

Abigail agrees and asks Will to help her get dressed. It's awkward, but she does it because there's little else she can do.

 

-

 

" _It isn't very smart to piss of the girl who thinks about killing people for a living._ "

The words fall hard from Jack's mouth in the silence of the office, slide off the computer and out his lips and fall with a thud to the floor. Will wonders how no one else hears that. She thinks about Abigail and her scarf-hidden scar and Freddie Lounds standing there in her cheetah print skirt and poncho and really, it isn't often she gets angry like that. She thinks about Lecter's hand resting on her upper back (You said I was insane, and, I can undo that), burning her through her three layers of clothes. He sits on her left, Alana on her right with Jack in front of them. 

No one is happy.

Jack continues, "You know what else isn't smart?" as he directs his question to Lecter. "You were there with her and you let those words come out of her mouth."

"I trust Will to speak for herself," Lecter answers and she's very surprised and mildly pleased to find at least someone thinks she deserves a little independence. 

"Evidently you shouldn't."

Looking backing back and forth between them and Jack, Alana says, "I'm just glad the story wasn't about Abigail Hobbs," and Will can agree with that, at least.

Jack, apparently, doesn't. Not that she particularly expected him to; he can act very protective when he wants to and since he doesn't like to yell at her, any feelings of anger get warped into something useless and condescending and she just wishes she was alone right now. "Well, then, it's a victory," he says, sarcasm curling around his mouth as he directs his annoyance unfairly at Alana and the absent Freddie Lounds. The woman had been wearing heels and they went click-clack against the pavement and this is the adult form of calling her a witch who can read minds. He adds, "So Abigail Hobbs wants to go home. Let's take her home."

"What Abigail wants and what Abigail needs are different things," Alana protests immediately and the Hobbs girl snatches hearts faster and more effectively than her father ever did in a much less malicious context. Will can't let herself believe she was ever an accomplice. "Taking her out of the controlled environment would be reckless."

"You said she was practical," Jack points out.

"That could just mean dissociative disorder," Will says, but her friend's already overlapping her with "You take her home, she could experience some intense emotions, respond aggressively, or reenact some aspect of the traumatic event without even realizing it."

Once upon a time, after Will was stabbed, the final psychiatrist she saw - her final psychiatrist until now, that is - said that was why she stopped eating and it was rapidly morphing into something more dangerous. She hadn't listened and Jack just ended up being stubborn. Jack is stubborn now, too, and refuses to let this go. "Where do you weigh in on this, doctor?" he asks Lecter.

"Doctor Bloom is right," he says, "but there is a scenario where revisiting the trauma event could help Abigail heal and actually prevent denial."

Lecter likes to talk about "scenarios," though they are all hypothetical. People think that's what Will does - graphs out the hypothetical carrying out of crimes in her head, but her brain connects in facts and not in what-ifs. Alana is not pleased. Jack chooses the opinion he likes best, and pins the breaking point on Will. She doesn't like it when she's the cause for decisions outside of solving a case and finishing up so she can go home and feed her dogs. 

At least they let her come along.

 

-

 

Originally, she meant to keep Double Vision between only Lecter and herself, but Abigail is where it began and unfortunately not where it ended and Will feels that she owes it to the girl to understand it's not so cut and dry. When they divided up the rooms, Abigail shared with Alana and both Will and Lecter had their own. Though she had the option to stay with Abigail, she declined, not wanting to wake her up from her constant fits. Now she stands outside with her, leaning against the balcony and both in pajamas since the place is so empty this counts as privacy, because for whatever reason, the girl decided she was the better choice than waking up her temporary roommate.

She asks, "Do you have nightmares about being my dad? About - how did you put it? - being his 'shadow suspended on dust.'"

With a small nod, Will crosses her arms and looks down below to the parking lot. She's thirteen years this girl's senior and three inches shorter and feels, to a certain degree, afraid of her. "Sometimes," she answers and hesitates before adding in a more honest manner, "Sometimes I'm you."

(there's a stag staring her down and Garrett Jacob Hobbs has a knife to her throat but his shadow is hers and her shadow is his and everything is bright and clear in her dreams)

Abigail stares at her, confused and maybe even a little scared, too, but in a way she's like Will without the insanity. "What do you mean, me?"

"Many serial killers target women," she says, telling not quite the truth but not quite a lie either. "Miss Lounds says I'm crazy, but what I have is actually empathy disorder and unfortunately this means I can see in the aftermath how the killer felt - what went through his mind, his method, his reasoning. But sometimes I identify with the victim and I feel them, too."

For quite some time Abigail is quiet and her thoughts float above their heads in the slow drawn, cold breeze before she asks, "What did I feel like?"

"Afraid." Will's answer is immediate. "Afraid for yourself and your mother. Disbelieving - you couldn't understand your father turning suddenly on your mother or on you. In pain, then, and fear, inevitably, made it worse. Watching me shoot didn't help. You were torn between hating me and -"

"Relief." She focuses on a red Honda Civic, anything to look away. "That's - right. That's all...right."

"I'm sorry."

"Is that why you feel responsible?" Abigail says. "Dr. Lecter says you feel responsible for me."

Again, she hesitates, before she says, "Having someone feel obligated to help you with everything is not something I'm putting anyone through unless they want it. Especially not from someone like me."

(the delicate figurine in a series of strong statues that make up Jack's team and they all think she needs protection.

No one deserves that patronization that accompanies that)

"I barely know what I want at all," the girl tells her. "Can I get back to you on that?"

"Take all the time you need."

She knows no one will ever need her. All she can do is think like a murderer, and be a victim of her own mind.  

 

-

 

The moment she sees the body of Abigail's friend, she calls Jack. She's not stupid enough to delay and deal with it on her own. Will just wishes the girl hadn't seen.

When Jack comes, his first assumption is Abigail Hobbs, but her fear had been too genuine for that to be true. For the first time, he also questions whether or not Will knows what she's talking about. Lecter thinks Abigail is a target. Will has a headache (Don't take medication on an empty stomach, Dr. Kapland said and then they terminated all forms of relationship after that) building, pressing behind her eyes and growing towards her temples. Mushrooms and antler shards and shattered mirror pieces and tangled words. 

She tells herself she won't faint.

Somehow, Jack must see it or maybe Lecter did and told him because after the others are gone he doesn't stand close but closer than usual. Her mind starts to click into patterns and the killer's system and she wasn't wrong about it being the same person who murdered the copycat victim. 

This is her design.

She breaks the connection, perhaps faster than usual, as she feels herself bleed into the victim's pain and knows that Marissa was still alive when the antlers were pushed so carefully through her body, feels the earlier violation of her clothes stripped (Halloween, sophomore year of college, that green dress that was too long on her because of her height and she's not pretty in the slightest but drink meant -

Well, she's not getting into that. Regardless, it makes this body in particular more painful than some)

and knows if she gets any closer Jack will discover and take her away. She'll be unmade, mind left to break to sand and spill into an ocean filled with polluting motor oil that can only confine it for so long. Two people knowing is bad enough.

Then he gets the call. "An attack at the Hobbs' place," he says, hands on her shoulders, already dragging her to the door. "Local PD will take care of the body, you can explain on the way."

Attack.  _Alana, Lecter, Abigail._ "Is anyone hurt?" Her voice is stretched thin. So are his lips.

"Minor injuries" is his clipped answer. She sees him, for a horrible moment, as the killer and her Marissa and then when she blinks, Garrett Jacob Hobbs stares at her in the reflection of the review mirror and the stag stalks next to the car in the moment before it presses too fast. She wants to cry, but no one has much respect for her actual person in the first place. Jack continues, "You're getting checked out too, Will."

"I'm fine," she says much too fast.

"You're fine my ass. Try again when you don't look like you spend winters in northern Sweden."

Since she's too tired to argue, she says, "Okay," and launches into her explanation of the murderer's mind. 

 

-

 

After Minnesota, Alana shows up at her door with bagels, a Redbox DVD, and pajama pants. "Are you even allowed to drive with your head like that?" Will asks her doubtfully after she declares just because they're both thirty-one doesn't mean they've outgrown the ability to crash while watching movies and invited herself inside.

Both of them know it's more complicated than that. 

As she drops to one knee to get some pets in, the other woman answers, "There's no concussion, so I don't see why not. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know how I feel about being alone at the moment."

Will never knows how she feels about being alone, but she knows it's safer than being with people. "I didn't realize I would be your go-to girl," she says, and fingers at the edge of a few pieces of paper on the table and for the moment, at least, feels more or less sane. 

"Why wouldn't you be?" Alana sheds her coat and tosses it over the back of a chair, makes herself at home. Makes the whole place warmer (raised on Southern values, learned company and hospitality mean comfort but you're a witch who can read minds, Graham Cracker, and the sentiment never caught on) just by being here. "We're friends. I am your friend, aren't I?"

Winston whines, butts his head lights into Alana's hand. "Of course," she says. "I'm just not very good at having friends. I'm never really sure if the feelings are mutual or if I'm just the person's project." Her mouth twists into a bitter smile. 

(poor little Raggedy Will with her stuffing falling from broken stitches and everyone thinks they can take a bent needle and discolored thread and  _fix her_ )

"Well, this is verbal verification that you're my friend. I don't have projects," Alana says, flipping her dark brown curls over her shoulder and she's the type of person Will always wanted to be before she realized there's too much going on in her head to be anything other than what she is. "And I'd ask you why you normally feel like a 'project,' but we have a movie night of denial to get through and I'll spare you the pain of being psychoanalyzed."

"Thanks for that."

She allows her friend (real friend, how rare is that, no mushrooms between them to form a connection because psychotic killer pharmacists are often wrong even when they think they're right, she finds) to pull her towards her bedroom because Alana is one of the few people she can handle touching her and sets up the DVD. Slumber parties are a childhood stage she missed and tonight she curls up in bed after a movie and bagels she doesn't touch with a concrete person sleeping on the couch. 

Even though she doesn't rest much herself, she feels safer than she has in a long, long time. 

 

-

 

On a Tuesday, Lecter approaches the inevitable subject she's been dreading. Kapland took meticulous notes and as usual, everything transferred when her psychiatrist changed after a single, quick phone call from Jack. As of now, she's been prescribed nothing but a continuation of her migraine medication that seems to be working less and less and she's thankful for that; pills were always relatively useless on her to begin with. So is therapy.

She doesn't understand what's going on now, but she knows it's not that.

"Your last psychiatrist reported that you exhibit signs of a developing eating problem," he says, though he's not looking at any notes. "You show few indications, nor do you fit the traditional profile."

 _Traditional profile._ He makes her sound like a murderer. "She was exaggerating and overdramatic," she answers, tense. "I'd recently been stabbed and the Vicodin they gave me severely reduced my appetite. So unless vegetarianism suddenly counts as an eating problem or disorder, then I'm fine."

(skipped meals as a child, chewing sunflower seeds - bleed petals, a flower grows after every step and blood cakes under her fingernails like boat motor oil)

"You do not eat meat?"

"I worked at KFC as an undergrad. You wouldn't eat meat either."

Lecter just nods, though he seems mildly incredulous and all Will wants is to quickly move away from the subject of food because he's remarkably good at picking out her lies, but that does not mean she has a  _problem_. She has a lot of problems, but forgetting a day's worth of food now and again isn't the end of the world. Not when she spends her nights as victims or murderers or a poor lost girl in Louisiana feeling shadows of her classmates' lives. 

He asks her the last time she ate. "Earlier today," she says, and it's not technically a lie. "Beverly brought me out for coffee at a place near her house. She said Price and Zeller were annoying her so she wanted girl time."

"But you do not believe her." His gaze is even and she's not particularly sure he believes her now, either.

Shaking her head slightly, she answers, "Jack's been...worried. Since Abigail's friend was murdered. They call more than usual."

He asks, "Do you think perhaps this is caused by the recent absence in cases?" and she feels a little sick.

"I don't know," she says, thinking about Alana and how genuine she was and how Will is supposed to be empathetic and that it's wrong how easy it is to slip into the mind of a killer but not a coworker or a friend. A psychiatrist can psychoanalyze her but often times she can reverse the situation and do the same to them. Alana and Lecter seem to be the exceptions. It's like the moment she grows some form of emotional attachment, the shadows evaporate into hard to grasp smoke; the dust settles.

Needless to say, she doesn't like it.

Neither subject is a good one, but there always is a lesser of two evils, and Lecter still decides on the worse topic. "You were thin when we met, Will," he says, leaning back in his chair. "You have gotten thinner - though it is not noticeable to those who don't look. Have you been regressing?"

"No," she says too quickly. "Being back in the field just means more movement than I had as a simple teacher. That's it."

She has always had trouble with eye contact, but he refuses to let it break, unnerving her (like the stag that stares her down in her sleep) and she knows he doesn't believe her. Regardless, he says, "Of course, Will," and closes the chapter.

The slam of it is deafening.

 

-

 

(This is the truth, in one hundred words or less:

Too poor as a kid, skipped meals often, stress in college kept a habit she couldn't break. Law enforcement turned her curse into something worse, and it was never quite a nightmare in the traditional sense. Teaching nearly cured her. 

Then, Garrett Jacob Hobbs and three days straight of heavy acquaintance with her bathroom. The human mushroom garden. Returning the house, the friend and reported pillow full of hair.

Is it really that surprising?)

 

-

 

For once, the killer feels an awful lot like a victim too and Mrs. Turner's dead eyes stare up at her, accusatory, because she came into this home without a break-in and ruined dinner. Maggots eat at the leftover food and Jack hovers close in the doorway when Will draws back into her own mind. The dead victims' fear is still heavy in the air and presses against her chest, cuts off the air in her lungs and makes it hard to breathe. She wants to get out.

Crossing his arms and leaning against the wall, Jack asks her, "What do you see, Will?"

She sees two children, a father, a mother, faceless murderers, and herself in a pieced together mirror with ten cracks that show. She's everyone's reflection. "Family values," she answers.

"Whose family values?"

She doesn't say anything right away, just slips out of the chair and over to him, away from the table with the dead family and rotten food covered in crawling maggots that make her stomach turn. "Theirs, the murderer's," she says, pinching the bridge of her nose. "They differ. Differing ideologies. Multiple killers, but this was only personal to the one at the head of the table. The Turners were caught in a crossroad and they had nowhere to run."

Jack nods vaguely and claps her on the shoulder. "Go take a seat while we set up," he tells her, gesturing to the open front door where Katz and Price are talking with equipment in their hands, waiting for her to finish. "I'll call you back in when we're done."

I'm fine, she wants to say but doesn't because no one listens, she finds, and there's no need to waste her words. She's not a child, hasn't been long before the age she should've stopped had she been normal, but few people seem to remember that most days. Jack and his team especially.

When she gets outside, Zeller lets her know where the bottled water is this time around without her asking and Will wishes it was possible to fade. 

 

-

 

"I was referring to Abigail."

This is the problem with Lecter: she'll deflect one subject and he'll just bring up something worse. Not wanting to talk about her mother hadn't meant she wanted to talk about Abigail Hobbs.

In many ways, she'd rather keep talk about the Turner family, despite getting little enjoyment out of discussing work outside of crime scenes and the office or classroom.

Discussing parental feelings will never give her a neat psychological assessment (words are jumbled, tossed around and twisted in her head and this is complicated enough that she needs to pull them apart carefully and connect one by one to properly articulate what she means), but this isn't childhood and she can't just call pass. "I've said this before," she tells him. "I'm not fit for motherhood. Abigail needs someone like Alana to help her, not someone like me."

"And what is that supposed to be?" he asks. "'Someone like you.'"

This is steadily becoming more and more uncomfortable. "I'm not...stable. Her father was already a murderer. She doesn't need the woman who killed him and routinely pretends to be people like him in her life."

Lecter gives her the look that goes straight through her, picks apart her brain and all the stuffing inside and finds what's supposed to be there. She likes him, but she's always been afraid of letting people inside her head. "This is why you have not visited her since the weekend in Minnesota." Will confirms. "On the contrary, I believe visiting Abigail in the hospital may be helpful to her. Despite the unfortunate nature of the circumstances, you also saved her life."

(she's Hobbs and then she's Abigail and then she's killing herself)

She can't particularly imagine Alana agreeing, or it really helping anyone in the first place. Even so, she says she'll give it a shot and tells herself she'll try.

 

-

 

Since most of her lessons are on profiling, they focus on her most recent solved cases or a famous one that most people have heard of. Despite this, she does have certain subjects she needs to teach.

Today she's lecturing on sexual assaults and starts with bite marks. It's almost a relief when Jack comes in and dismisses the class.

No matter how many times she teaches this, it never gets any easier. 

(she really hates Halloween) 

 

-

 

She hates Christmas too.

After she nearly faints at the crime scene, the horrific smell mixing badly with the tortured emotions of child killer and his murdered family, Katz practically drags her outside, glaring at a man who makes some offhand comment to the officer next to him about weak women, and sits her down on the stoop. The other woman says something she doesn't hear and the whole world's just gone kind of quiet - mute in past snow fall, never snowed in Louisiana, never snows like that out at sea. Their breath comes out in little huffs of condensation, twisting up in the wind like discarded, tragic thoughts. Diffusion of emotion Will feels even days later. 

This Lost Boy's family was very afraid, but he had been terrified. Family is a foreign notion, but a far cry from a crime. Everyone needs to stop acting like she's their Lost Girl project and they can piece together her ten glass shards all on their own. It makes her afraid, too.

 

-

 

Katz finds her in her classroom researching Frist and Turner and Will hasn't slept in three days. The computer screen twists and she pictures herself at twelve - fly away, bouncy curls and bare feet on the sand, gangly limbs as she first hit puberty on the latter side of average, and this is right at the age where people started noticing that her mind worked in leaps and bounds and she knew things she shouldn't without understanding how (Lorraine Sinclair, superstitious Catholic neighbor at the time with three orange cats and mind going sideways in a way Will's won't, telling Dad it wasn't too late if she asked for forgiveness from God for her devil-worshipping because Mrs. Harrison hadn't told anyone yet that her parents were dead). She'd known how to raise herself for a while, then, and wondered if she could run away and find somewhere to live alone.

"So who exactly is Willard Wigan?" she asks in the car as they go to meet up with Jack because apparently someone needs to be sent to fetch her now. 

Taking a sip of her coffee, Katz answers, "I was making a point. He's an artist who apparently can get  _very_ focused. When you weren't picking up your phone, I figured you were concentrating too hard on something."

Her phone. It had been on the desk next to her the whole time, but she hadn't noticed it go off. She slips it out of her pocket and checks the missed calls. One from Alana, one from Katz, three from Jack. This is called screwing up. "I'm sorry," she says, putting it back. "I should've been paying attention."

The other woman shrugs her shoulder. "It's fine by me," she says. "I like getting out of that room. Besides, happens to the best of us. When I was in college, I used to sleep through my alarm all the time."

That's a problem Will's never had. Insomnia developed at the age of seven when she dreamed of playground bullies and mean teachers instead of murdered families and their children. "Are we really calling them the Lost Boys?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who made it up." Katz throws out the empty coffee in a hallway trashcan. "You know, when I was a kid, I used to love  _Peter Pan._ And I mean really loved it. Like, to the point I went and saw the live action version when it came out in Two Thousand Three."

In 2003, Will was twenty-one. She was Tinker Bell for that one Halloween she dressed up for.  _Peter Pan_ has no pleasant memories for her. "My freshman roommate used to make me watch Disney movies with her," she says, though she's rapidly losing her willingness to talk. "Her favorite was  _Beauty and the Beast._ "

"I never pictured you to be the Disney type."

"Thanks to Sarah I can list most of the animated filmography in order." She likes  _Robin Hood_ the best, even if it is a story told with foxes and lions and snakes. 

With a small smile, Katz just shakes her head in disbelief and pushes open the glass door where Jack and the Lost Boys are waiting. 

 

-

 

Maybe it's Lecter's advice or maybe it's the case, but Will ends up in Abigail's room with a bag of presents. Even though she's embarrassed and a little confused at her own behavior, she hands it over, relieved that despite everything, today is a good day. "You didn't have to," the girl says, accepting the bag. 

"I figured you might want more scarves, as you wear so many," Will answers awkwardly, watching her pull out the three in there. She knows how to dress fashionably, though she doesn't (New Orleans days in thrift store, dresses cheaper than jeans, that Halloween costume for the party Ryan Zimmerman invited her too, and layer, layer, layer) try for herself; she memorized what she knew of the girl's wardrobe and matched. "If you don't like them, I have the receipts. I'll just return them."

"No, these are great," Abigail tells her, unwinding her current scarf from her neck and replacing it with a new argyle one. "Thanks. This is good for winter."

Will smiles closed mouth at her happiness, and enjoys the genuine base of it. "I received permission to bring you out for a few hours if you'd like," she says, careful not to overstep her boundaries (thick red lines drawn out in blood in the snow that a giant stag walks, leaving hoof prints in the landscapes of her dreams) because it was the paternal and not maternal relationship that was torn to shred. She doesn't want Abigail thinking she's trying to be anything she isn't. "Not now, of course, but soon. When I finish this case."

"They'll let you do that?"

"Well, I am technically down as your legal guardian. And Dr. Bloom said it would be all right if it weren't for too long."

Then Abigail is smiling too, clutching the other two scarves in her hands. "I can get out of here? When'll you be done?"

There's a clock in her head clicking towards endgame, but it's fuzzy and there are too many off shoot possibilities lying in between (little Lost Boys flying down east coast highways, stitched up ragdolls themselves with thread coming undone, leaving a trail of string for her to follow) for her to know. "I'm not sure yet," she answers honestly. "For now we can go for a walk around the ground or - well, I don't know what you like to do around here." She hasn't been here since Minnesota.

Abigail says she's sick of being stuck in the room and she can only go for a walk if she has someone with her and she doesn't like any of the staff. Will lets herself be lead around and when she leaves, she promises to return soon. 

 

-

 

Chris positions the gun in level to her head and she holds her arms out in surrender. There's a mirror and there's a piece, but it's vague and small and today is a better day than she's been having lately. "You're home now," she tells the boy, taking in the sight of floppy hair and oversized clothes brought at that one thrift shop down the road from nowhere. "Put the gun down, Christopher."

Then the woman exits the pool house, wraps herself around the kid and places her gun solid over her heart. The perverse sign of her love to the children she convinces have only her. "Shoot her, Christopher," she says, watching Will with steady eyes. 

There are too many people and too much going on for her to do more than slowly drop to her knees and hope Chris doesn't have it in him to pull the trigger because taking a life is not something you simply get over. She's not surprised when the shot rings out clear from the side and the woman drops at one bullet from Katz's gun. Will stands and rushes over to find the woman still alive on the floor, gasping for air in a puddle of blood. This time, there is no mirror - it was Chris' headspace she entered, this isn't the victim, it's a perpetrator she can't identify much with. 

Still, Will can't help but wonder if this is how Abigail sees her.  

 

-

 

Despite Alana's warning that last time she left she had a panic attack, Abigail is more or less normal when Will checks her out for a few hours. Going to Virginia would take too long, so she brings her to the ocean because the girl says she's never been to the coast before, that her mother was afraid of flying. 

"Too bad it's cold," she says with a small frown, looking up and down the empty beach. "I want to go in the water."

Will is relatively sure Alana would kill her if she ever did that, but she doesn't say it. Instead she answers, "In about six months is when the beaches get filled. You'll probably be out by then."

"Yeah, if I ever find anywhere to go."

"We can help you," she says immediately. "Dr. Bloom, Dr. Lecter, and I. Right now everything is stirred up - think dust when you open something untouched for a long time and everything goes up into the air - and it needs to settle before any real decisions are made. I'm sorry I can't be of more help now."

(waves hitting rock and the saltwater spray the resulting effect with her first case arriving as a dead body washing up on the shore back when she was too young to hold a job.

It took three days locked in her dorm room to convince herself she wasn't the murderer and everything was just in her head. Somehow, that was even worse)

Abigail doesn't look happy, but she nods and doesn't argue.

 

-

 

She was following the stag that normally follows her, stumbling through a foot of snow in a forest, running away from the voice who tells her he'll take it all away. But then she's on a road, dead in the middle with two cops holding flashlights who shine the artificial lights in her face, no animal or murderer or reflection in sight, and it's so very, very cold.

The officer on the left asks her, "Are you lost?" and she takes in the words that twist through the air in the puff of smoke that exits his mouth from the chill - digests them, orders them into a neat line that Freddie Lounds would be proud of before they tangle themselves up somewhere in her wrist bones and press hard against the stitches. He continues, "What's your name?"

"Will Graham," she answers, pieces together these words carefully into a neat, straight line too (because the stag is watching her and she doesn't know if it's ready to charge or warning her not to turn around because where do the victims and killers go once they stop existing - they get locked in her brain and stay). "Wilhelmina Graham." The curse from a grandmother she never met.

"Do you know where you are, Miss Graham?" The officer on the right isn't speaking. Inferior then, not used to night patrol and taking cues from his boss. Will shakes her head. "Where do you live?"

Louisiana, West Virginia, a dozen places scattered across the US and she leaves pockmark scars wherever she goes, frightening neighbors and classmates and coworkers and roommates. Friendship is difficult when your mind makes leaps like mental mushrooms growing on comatose bodies buried in shallow graves. "Wolf Trap, Virginia," she says, voice rough with sleep. 

(sometimes she feels them bloom from her finger tips, pushing apart stitches that make up the exterior of her Raggedy Will body)

Both officers stare her down and suddenly she is very aware of how horribly cold she is. "We're in Wolf Trap, so that's good," he says. "You're close to home." He lowers his flashlight. "Is that yours?"

One of her dogs moves close around her, unnoticed until now. He hadn't been in her dream - if that even was a dream, considering that she's no longer curled up in bed. "Oh, hi, Winston." She's hit by the need to call Alana, Lector, Katz, someone to pick her up and take her somewhere she doesn't fall ill from something as silly as hypothermia. 

There are two strange men in front of her, law enforcement or not, and all she sleeps in is a sports bra and pajama pants. She has no gun on her, is mediocre in her self-defense, hasn't eaten more than a granola bar in two days. To make matters worse, she left her cell phone at home, inevitably; it's not as if these pants have pockets. Besides, she shouldn't bother them. They can't know. Everyone treats her like she's such a child anyway, like she needs some form of watchfulness to keep her from falling over. 

Except for Lecter. He's the only one who seems to understand she's actually an adult in her early thirties.

Though her leading instinct is to run (voice whispers he'll take it all away, following her in a forest where the trees are made of mirror glass and sunflowers grow with every step), she asks to sit down because her feet hurt. "How about we get you home?" the officer says, and he does not have the voice of any serial killer she's recently encountered. She agrees and follows him to the car where he lets her have a seat and a blanket but leaves the door open, crouching to her level outside. "Are you on any drugs?" he adds. "Medication? Prescription or otherwise?"

"No," she answers as a headache begins to bloom in the space behind her eyes. 

"Have you been drinking?"

"No." Outside of coffee and water, she doesn't like to put much inside her. It's hard enough ingesting words when she has her bad days without the added pressure of more food than necessary in her stomach. 

She can see the officer running out of options, though he has yet to reach levels of exasperation. His shift doesn't end for another few hours and she's the most entertaining thing he's met in days. "Do you have a history of sleepwalking, Miss Graham?"

Pulling the blanket tighter around herself, she says, "I'm not even sure I'm awake now."

The second, silent officer returns with a shirt three sizes too big and tells her she can keep it. His voice is deeper (her father in his last few years of illness, throat torn to shred from years of cigarette smoke and he gave up of his crazy freak of a daughter long before that) than she expected. They bring her home.

 

-

 

Even though he said multiple times that it was all right, she still feels as though it's over stepping her boundaries when she knocks at Lecter's door at seven in the morning. Of course, he also told her the same number of times that she could call him Hannibal, but she hasn't exactly met that stage yet.

He ushers her inside the moment he sees her, going straight to the kitchen, which isn't unusual. "I'm sorry for the earliness of the hour," she says when he hands her a mug of coffee and buttered toast. It's a light breakfast she can stomach often enough, which must be a purposeful decision. 

"Never apologize for coming to me," he says. "Office hours are for patients only. My kitchen is always open for friends."

 _Friends._ That word has been tossed (tangled up next to  _daughter_ and  _mother_ and  _lost_ and everything she's been collecting that gets caught around her bones) towards her more and more lately and she hopes this isn't some joke, that it won't suddenly be snatched away from her one day soon. She's already so close to breaking and last night shows she may be closer than she original thought. The idea is not a comforting one.

Lector mentions something about sleepwalking being more common in children than adults that she barely catches, distracted by the distant sound of faint hooves clacking against tile floor. "Could it be a seizure?" she asks. 

"That I doubt," he answers. "More likely good old fashion Post Traumatic Stress. Jack Crawford has gotten your hands very dirty."

Ever since her freshman year of college when she was first forced into psychiatry appointments, that label's been thrown in her face, though the reason why always seems to change. "I was forced back into the field," she says, because it's a statement that feels safe. 

As he fiddles with something else kitchen-related, he says, "I wouldn't say forced. Manipulated would be the word I'd choose."

"I can handle it."

Though she likes Lector and Alana very much and knows it really does work on most people, she's always seen therapy as a form of manipulation, too. She thinks he knows this too, but he simply continues, "Somewhere between denying horrible events and calling them out lies the truth of psychological trauma."

"So I can't handle it." He looks from the toast to her, lifts an eyebrow, and she takes an obligatory bite. 

"Your experience may of overwhelmed your ordinary senses that give you a sense of control," he tells her as if that didn't just happen. 

She takes a few more bites, afraid he won't let her go until she eats something. "My body is walking around without my permission," she says. "You'd say that's a loss of control?"

"Wouldn't you?" he answers, and they both take a drink. The coffee is good and Lector explains about sleepwalkers and tries to blame it on Jack.

When her phone goes off and she reads the caller ID, that quiet part of her mind says she was too quick to defend him.

(she tells herself to shut up)

 

-

 

Her reflection shows a good sleep - a self-righteous one brought on by religious elevation of the preserved wicked - but her proverbial waking up is more akin to the abrupt awareness of a nightmare than the glory of seeing angels watching over her. She breaks the mirror with a head, but the killer is now absorbed under her skin. 

Someone gets her up and over to the bathroom before she throws up herself. 

It's Jack. She's not sure if she should blame him for this continuous rain of invisible glass or her steadily breaking mind, but she knows with utter certainty that this is the toast's fault. Eating after a night like that was not a good idea (neither is lying down where a murderer slept after building a sliver of Heaven out of blood and internal organs, or sleepwalking shirtless down a deserted street in the middle of a January night) and right now is perfect proof. With shaking hands, she flushes the toilet when she finishes, amazed she even made it this far. "Does this count as contaminating the crime scene?" she asks, voice filled with thin shreds and grains of toast and she wants to go home.

"The bathroom is clean," Jack answers. "You're in the clear. Was that sleep deprivation or what you saw, Will?"

"Both," she says. "And I ate something bad this morning. Jack, this killer thought this was absolution or purification or  _something._ That isn't the normal behavior of someone afraid. Somehow, he slept through the night. The vomit wasn't dry - it must have been this morning."

She stands, stumbles over to the sink to rinse out her mouth while he hovers behind her (an adult to a toddler and she's thirty-one not a child, first memory at two-years-old and Dad holding her hands as she walked down the steep stairs of their latest cheap motel.

Is this because she's a woman or because she’s the type to walk unaware down a street at night?)

in preparation for her to fall. "So he's doing this for them?" he says and she supports herself there with shaking arms. If the bathroom is clean, it means he hadn't even showered - or wiped down well enough to leave no residue. 

Shaking her head, she answers, "Only partially, if this is truly about them at all. He is...selfish, though he convinces himself this is a just by giving them salvation. This is for him. He built himself angels to watch over him while he slept. I don't think - I need to get out of here."

She gets herself out without his help and finds the others already setting up the crime scene while Jack follows her outside until she finds the car to lean again. "You don't think what?" he asks. 

"I don't think this will be the last kill," she says and takes a deep breath, trying to absorb the empty air in order to expel some of the murderer. "There has to be other nights he sleeps, other nights he thinks he'll need angels to guard him. He may believe helping these victims achieve absolution will help him reach Heaven."

"That's enough to start off with," Jack tells her. "Just stick around here and find yourself some water. I think Beverly brought crackers. We'll need you once the bodies are back in the lab." They set up preemptive measures under the assumption she would have this reaction. She wonders what she says about them. She wonders what this says about her.

_You need a way out of dark places when Jack sends you there._

_Last time Jack sent me to a dark place, I sent something back._

The killer used fishing hooks. She feels herself skinning a woman alive, but she feels the weight of wings on her back, too. 

 

-

 

[Will, Hannibal finds, is almost as unforgivably loyal as she is unstable. Jack Crawford has done little to gain such respect, but he finds it more difficult than he originally believed it would be to plant the seeds of doubt in her breaking mind.

Do you feel abandoned? he asks. 

That requires expectation, she answers. 

He thinks she has a lot of expectations and none of them are the positive type he needs] 

 

-

 

Lecter says Jack abandoned her to deal with her head space alone, but she doesn't tell him her gradual decline, so perhaps it's her to blame. Like toast with butter and false angels protecting a dying man with their wings made from their own skin. 

Katz stands across from her, arms crossed with a woman's dead body between them. "Are you okay?" she says. "I know it's a stupid question, considering none of us could possibly be okay doing what we do, but are you okay?"

It is a stupid question, so it deserves a stupid answer. "Do I seem different?" Will asks. 

"You're a little different," Katz answers. "But you've always been a little different. Brilliant strategy. That way no one ever knows if something's up with you."

"How would I know something was up with you?"

(the moment she grows some form of emotional attachment, the shadows evaporate into hard to grasp smoke; the dust settles)

With a small smile, the other woman says, "You wouldn't. But I would tell you if you asked me. Return the favor?"

She seems so sincere in wanting to help that Will almost says, I haven't been sleeping, but Price comes over and the conversation is put off for another day. 

 

-

 

That morning Will wakes up in an oversized shirt and pajama pants on her roof with her dogs barking and later she sees a statue of the stag in Lecter's office. 

"Angel Maker will be destroyed by what's happening in his head," he says, walking up behind her. "You don't have to be."

But she will be. It doesn't matter where she goes or what she does because her stitches unravel on their own.

 

-

 

Despite what she knows, there is a truth is what Lecter said and under the deformed body of the Angel Maker, Will comes to accept it. "I don't know how much longer I can be all that useful to you, Jack," she says.

He comes up closer (adult support hovering next to a child in a way she hates because she might be suicidally stupid and walk cold roads asleep in the middle of the night, but can still handle it) and tells her, "Really? You caught three. The last three we had, you caught. You caught three of them."

It's almost like the way she thinks, picking apart words one by one and rearranging them in neat lines so sometimes the sentences come out in repeat or inside out. "I didn't catch this one, though," she answers. "This one surrendered."

"You know," Jack says, "I'm used to my wife not talking to me. I don't have to get used to you not talking to me too."

Is that what she is to him? The person he can take care of so he feels better about the silence of his wife? "It's getting harder and harder to make myself look," she says and wishes she weren't everyone's project.

She wants Alana.

"No one's asking you to look alone," he says.

"But I am looking alone. And you know what looking at this does."

(poor little Raggedy Will absorbing others through her fabric skin like water so mushrooms and sunflowers bloom behind her eyes and in her mind and all of them are nothing but poison piled on poison)

Jack slips his hands into his pockets. "I know what happens when you don't look," he says, "and so do you."

Yes, yes she does and neither situation is good but her sanity is pulling apart at the seams, the mirror shattering down into ten shards broken first by bullet holes and becoming smaller and smaller with each surface they hit. She wakes up on the roof her house and this killer took the easy way out. "I can make myself look, but the thinking is shutting down."

"What is it about this one?"

"It isn't this one, it's all of them," she answers. "It's the next one, it's the one I know is coming after that -"

"You want to go back to your lecture hall?" he interrupts. "Read about this stuff on TattleCrime?"

"No, I don't, but that may be what I have to do. This is  _bad_ for me."

To her surprise, Jack says, "I'm not your father, Will. I'm not going to tell you what to do."

Except that it seems like that's exactly what he's going to do. She looks down, tells herself not to get too emotional (you lose credibility that way as a woman, she learned the hard way, back before she had the sound of hooves clacking against pavement stalking her steps and knife wounds bleeding from her neck). "My head hurts," she says, brushing her bangs behind her ear. "Can I just get out of here?"

His eyes are sympathetic, but the Angel Maker was afraid and the two clash terribly. Jack puts his hand on her upper back, leads her away. "We can talk about this when you get some real sleep," he says, and she follows him to the car. She hadn't realized she was shaking until now. "I'm sure that'll help you clear your head."

She doesn't tell him she's not sure that's possible. Sometimes it's just easier to move on autopilot.

 

-

 

Dr. Chilton has wandering eyes and a curiosity that makes her uncomfortable. She thinks Jack must see it, too, in his own way, as he positions himself a little in front of her before they're directed to sit. Alana acts as a buffer between the two of them, but he acts as a buffer between her and everybody else.

Sometimes it's insulting. Sometimes she's relieved. 

There's a murdered nurse somewhere in the lower levels. "Miss Graham is going to need to see the crime scene," Jack says, "with as much privacy as you can provide."

She doesn't like how entertained by the notion Dr. Chilton looks (arms folded, back straight, ascertain of authority that must aggravate prisoners because Will knows a murderer's mind better than she knows her own). "Ah, yes," he says. "That thing you do. You're quite the topic of conversation in the psychiatric circle, Miss Graham."

Jack shoots her a sideline glance. "Am I?" she asks and feels terribly exposed.

"Ah, yes," Dr. Chilton repeats. "A unique cocktail of personality disorders and neuroses that make you a highly skilled profiler."

"She's not here to be analyzed," Jack cuts in. 

"Perhaps she should be." Will doesn't like it when people talk about her like she's (a piece of mirror pressed against an old wall parallel to an identical one, invisible to passersby who don't know where to look) not there. Dr. Chilton continues, "We are woefully short on material on people with your sort of thing, Miss Graham. Would you mind speaking to some of the staff?"

He stands, comes closer, and she tries not to press back further into the chair because she's here, but she doesn't want to be. Fact checking for Freddie Lounds. Jack tries to interrupt him again, and he promises not this trip. "Thank you, Dr. Chilton," she says, standing because the faster she becomes this killer for five minutes, the faster she can leave, "but I would like to see the crime scene now."

 

-

 

When Alana arrives, she pulls him to the side before talking to Dr. Chilton, letting Jack talk with him alone before ambushing him herself. "I heard you cried down at the crime scene," she says quietly and Will hasn't checked a mirror to see if her eyes are bloodshot or not. "Do you want to talk about it?"

 _I heard_ means she got the heads up over the phone because Lecter might accuse Will of making Abigail into her surrogate daughter but the truth is that Jack made her his a long time ago. "I'm fine," she lies, crossing her arms and pretending she doesn't feel the curious eyes of the staff as they walk by. "Can we do the Share and Care business when this is over? There are enough... _feelings_ floating around here to begin with."

"I knew bringing you in here would be a bad idea," her friend says, more to herself than anything else, and throws a look at Jack that isn't quite a glare (she has such lovely eyes that the killer would love to dig out with a nice shiny scalpel and Will just wants to reach up and cover them with her hands and drag Alana somewhere Abel Gideon can't find them). "Well, let's get this over with while we still have daylight, right?"

(the nurse had no eyes to cry with anymore)

"Right."

(she had been more guilty than afraid, in the end)

 

-

 

Jack might know when he's awake, but Will doesn't. Regardless, she knows she isn't sleeping when he and Alana enter his classroom in the wake of the stag leaving. 

At least she knows that's all in her head. 

She's not particularly sure how that leads to her sitting across from Freddie Lounds dressed in another fashion nightmare only four hours later. When she holds out her hand, Will doesn't accept it, but she seems more smug than offended (in high school, Rylee Liney calling her a witch with her heels click-clacking against tile floors like hooves against pavement and tabloids are only the adult form of the teenage rumor mill). "Miss Lounds," Jack says, settling into his seat, "you have all the qualifications of a good journalist - you have intelligence, guts, a good eye - so how is it you winded up where you winded up?"

(Freddie Lounds, college grad with a degree made useless by the economy inevitably, must be hard to get a job and left with the inevitable debt up to her ears but that isn't much of an excuse for what she does)

"Where I winded up being criminal justice journalism?"

"Criminal justice journalism being a euphemism for tabloid reporting," Will says, because she can identify with many different kinds of people but she'll never understand trash talking someone else for popularity or reviews. 

Her answer is a blank face. "You ran an unconfirmed story," Jack continues, "about the Chesapeake Ripper. What I want is for you to confirm it."

Leaning forward, Freddie says, "An exclusive story would be a coup."

"Yes it would," Jack agrees. "And you would get the satisfaction of seeing the Los Angeles Times, the sanctified Washington Post, even the holy New York Times run copyrighted material under your byline with a picture credit."

Around his back, Alana gives Will a look that means she's equally disturbed and most days it takes an extra push to make her happy, but Freddie Lounds acts as the united front none of them can stand. "What's against you," she says, "and by association us is that your brand of journalism  _is_ obnoxious and therefore disliked."

Lounds just smiles. "Yes, that is an obstacle," she answers before looking back at Jack. "I tried to get an interview with Dr. Gideon but I was denied. Evidently some trouble with my euphemism."

"I'm friendly with the new Chief of Staff," Alana tells her. "I can get you an interview."

"Not to snap bubblegum and crack wise, but what's my angle?" Lounds asks. "Is he the Chesapeake Ripper or do you just want me to tell everyone he is?"

Another headache is starting to form behind Will's eyes. "He could be," her friend answers. "Certain personalities are attracted to certain professions."

Jack says, "Do you know what professions psychopaths disproportionately gravitate to?"

"CEOs, lawyers, the clergy."

"Number five on the list is surgeons."

"I know the list."

Will lifts her head. "Then you know what number six is."

"Journalists," Lounds answers and then adds, sounding almost condescending, "Do you know what number seven is, Miss Graham?"

Of course she does, and Lounds knows she knows it too because that first and last article had a lot of research piled into it that shouldn't have been there. "Law enforcement."

Again, she smiles. "Here we are, a bunch of psychopaths helping each other out."

All Will wants to do is curl up and sleep soundly for one night at least. Last she checked, that takes murder off the agenda.

 

-

 

Everything is a little hazy when she ends up in Jack Crawford's bedroom sitting on his dresser, watching the others comb the scene for evidence while she exists in a state of sleep deprivation and general uselessness. "Did Miriam Lasse know where you lived?" she asks, and tries not to suffocate under the weight of the team's pity and Jack's miserable anger.

He stares down at her, bleak mood filling in all the cracks in the room and chasing away shadows (the Ripper's shadow, too, where it walked these carpeted floors and this time she can feel but not see and Gideon is not who he says he is. 

That she knows for certain)

as he says, "If she wanted to know, she was smart enough to find out."

"She could've told the Chesapeake Ripper before he killed her." Behind Jack, the others continue working as normal, but their pace is slow is enough to mean they're listening. Will adds, "Did you know you were sending her after him?"

"I was sending her after information," he answers. 

Information is as good as the murderer himself sometimes, something Will is an expert opinion on. "Whoever made that call," she says, "thinks you were close to Miriam Lasse and feel responsible for her death."

The look on his face shows that's exactly how Jack feels.

 

-

 

They find an arm and Katz brings her out for coffee.

"You look like you need it," is all she says when Will asks why, refusing to let her pay.

The coffee's from Starbucks, one of those overcomplicated sweet things that her peculiarities about food never quite touched - or couldn't touch, really, with all those sleepless nights at college spent with cappuccinos and text books. "Thanks," she answers, blowing off the topic and taking the seat. "It's been a long week."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Katz likes away at the whip cream gathered at the corner of her mouth. "I've never seen Jack so rattled before. Do you think he'll be all right?"

"He's Jack," she says. "If he's not all right, he'll say he's all right until he convinces himself he really is."

The other woman smiles, quick and flighty before it's gone. "That is an unbelievably good description." Will shrugs, though it comes out as more of a twitch, and taps her fingers silently against her knee. "Now how about you? Ready to return the favor? You asked if you seemed different, so I'm assuming something changed."

Of course that's what it's about. That's usually what it's about when people want to see her. "It's nothing," she lies. "Just sleeping less than usual, but it fixed itself. What about you? Are you okay?"

(at night she dreams of voices clawing at her bare feet as she stumbles through the snow but she hasn't gone sleepwalking in days. This is an improvement)

Even though Katz doesn't believe her, she doesn't call her out on it. "Been better," she answers. "Finding out a serial killer knows where your boss lives is about as fun as finding homemade angels in motel rooms." When Will doesn't say anything right away, she adds, "See? That's how reciprocation works."

Will just takes a sip of her coffee and smiles.  

 

-

 

[Katz doesn't like leaving Will alone a room like that with the door closed, which leaves her more shut off than usual, but Jack's acting more erratic than usual. When her friend calls out, her voice is high and slightly broken like she's been crying. And sure, she gets the girl's the best and all that fancy shit, but this is a little much. It's like he's pushing her into the Chesapeake Ripper without realizing how scared she is.

Then she shuts the door in Brian's face like it's nothing when usually that counts as a something and Katz wonders if Jack realizes he's on the verge of creating another Miriam Lasse.

She's not just going to sit by and let that happen]

 

-

 

Her phone rings just as Lecter leaves after their discussion on the Ripper and Jack and public humiliation and to her surprise it's Abigail's voice that says, " _Is this Will?_ "

(she's sitting across from Abigail with their necks bleeding glass and sunflower petals and Cassie Boyle impaled on antlers next to them.

I like that this is just the two of us, Abigail says.

Someone else is here, Abigail says. 

Will's neck stitches itself back together and the world shatters into glass that break through to reality. 

She's pretty sure she's not dreaming)

"Yes," she answers, shuffling the pictures together in an orderly fashion so she can bring them back to Jack and never back home. "I thought you weren't allowed to use the phone past six, Abbie."

" _We're not, normally_ ," the girl says, voice coming in thin from the bad connection (stretched hush, hush in dreamland but Will knows with a strange amount of certainty that she's awake). " _Just, two of the nurses were talking about TattleCrime and I wasn't meant to overhear, but I did, so I made them tell me because everyone knows you're down as my legal guardian, and Dr. Fitz said I could call and see how you were doing._ "

Considering how much Abigail hates it there, Will suspects the reason behind the call is much more selfish than that. In a way, this is something of a relief; everyone else worries about her and she doesn't need the closest thing she'll ever have to a kid of her own worrying about her too. "Freddie Lounds doesn't always use creditable sources," she says anyway, slipping the pictures into her bag. The snapshot bodies drag her down with an imagined weight. "I'm doing fine because she exaggerates. How are you doing?"

Abigail's voice drops into a quieter tone before she says, " _I'm bored. They never tell me anything and everyone acts like I'm going to break. Either that or they're scared of me. Dr. Bloom's the only one who ever talks to me. When are you coming back?_ "

(I like that it's just the two of us, Abigail says.

Maybe Will should keep her distance. 

Maybe Alana and Lecter would kill her for it)

"When this case wraps up," she promises, reaching the elevator and nodding to one of her students who gives her a bright smile as their paths momentarily intersect. "I can talk to the nurses about checking you out again for a few hours."

" _Could you maybe try for overnight? Talk Dr. Bloom into it? I want to meet your dogs._ "

"My spare bed isn't exactly comfortable."

" _Anything's more comfortable than this, Will. Everything's so hard here._ "

An invisible someone's shadow stands behinds her in the elevator, breathing over her shoulder. She feels like she's making a mistake when she says, "I'll see what I can do," and sees Abigail's smile as a perfectly clear picture in her mind. "Now I have to go. Work beckons. I'll come by soon."

" _Bye, Will. I'll be here. Waiting. Like usual._ "

As they hang up, Will wonders if she was that overdramatic at eighteen too and despite the dissolving nightmare of her life and the more literal one less than an hour earlier, she still feels a rare smile tug at the corners of her mouth.

 

-

 

They catch the organ harvester and Lecter saves a man's life, only to throw a dinner party as celebration for a job well done. He asks Will to stay, but after today, the thought of food makes her feel even sicker than usual. "I can make you a simple salad," he offers, and at least he remembers. 

"I'm afraid I won't be good company," she says, pulling her hair back and watching his hands move.

He does that even stare that goes directly through her. "Do you truly mean this or is this related to you purposeful aversion to food?"

This is the first time since their actual discussion that he's brought up the subject. "The former," she answers, and she knows this is enough of the truth to be passable. "Besides, I have a date with the Chesapeake Ripper."

"I imagine Jack is disappointed."

With a slight nod, she says, "Enjoy your wine."

She can't leave fast enough.

 

-

 

Alana says Abigail is doing well and it might help both of them if she spends the night, so Will makes sure to stock the refrigerator with sensible groceries before picking the girl up and bringing her home. The dogs instantly love her.

"Was it the important guy?" Abigail asks, scratching Winston behind the ear as Will pours her some cranberry juice and makes two sandwiches. When she apologized for having nothing but vegetarian food, Abigail confessed that she wasn't so willing to eat meat anymore, though she tried because that was mainly what they offered at the hospital.

Sunlight filters through the open curtains, shining on the for once uncovered scar that she knows Will sometimes feels on her neck, too. "No," she answers, bringing over the meager lunch that is still inevitably a step up from hospital regulated food. "Just someone very similar. We'll catch him eventually, though. Jack always does."

Abigail takes a bite of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sip of juice before saying, "You mean _you_ will. You should really hear what people say about you."

"I try not to. Most of it isn't nice."

(Freddie Lounds in her bedroom typing away half-truths closer to lies and contaminating crime scenes wherever you go, says Jack)

The girl just shrugs. "I don't think they'd talk so much if it weren't for me," she tells her. "Guess that's ironic considering everyone's trying to make sure I don't hear."

But she does anyway, it seems (Alana says she has a penchant for manipulation and Will sees it, but she's manipulative too when she wants to be and that doesn't make them murderers so people can be wrong). "That's usually how life goes," she says, because that's an observation based on solid evidence.

Abigail deflates with a released sigh, tension leaving her body all in one breath. There's something else, some other agenda other than "getting out" for the night and Will asks what it is. "You said you'd help me when everything settled down," she answers, and this is the first time Will has ever seen her nervous. "I want to go to school, but that's another thing that got fucked up because of -" She takes a deep breath, sighs again. "Anyway, could I, maybe, use your last name? Change it legally for applications. Dr. Bloom and all the psychiatrists at the hospital go on and on about starting over fresh and I'm not letting go of Abigail Hobbs, but I can't go forward if I hold on to it either."

(Mom, there's someone else here)

Will hesitates. "That's what they would call a 'big commitment,'" she says eventually, "and I'm not sure I'm someone you want to tether yourself to, either."

"You're already down as my legal guardian. You're the one that saved my life. If I use another name, I don't want to make something up."

(You can't be her everything, Will)

"We'll talk about it more when we get closer to making a decision like that," she answers lamely. "With Dr. Bloom, Dr. Lecter, maybe the psychiatrists in the hospital - even if it's just a name, there may be some say in the connotation."

Abigail says screw the connotation, but she's the gloriously ignorant age of eighteen, even after all she's been through. Will promises again that they'll visit the subject at a later, more appropriate date, and suggests picking up a movie at the Target in town. They don't discuss it again for the rest of their time together.

 

-

 

"Why call me?"

"I have no upper body strength," Will answers, glancing at Alana, "and I can't imagine wrangling a wounded animal by myself. I know, it's not what you want to do at nine in the morning in the middle of winter."

Alana smiles. "I've done worse," she says. "I prefer your voice over the phone to Jack's - what's wrong? Do you see anything?"

Will looks around, checks the ground and surrounding area with vague confusion. "No, actually -" (hoof prints from an animal that would never make that noise, nonexistent, walking silent one while she stumbles blindly through it, bumping into trees made unseen by reflective glass) "- I'm not even seeing any tracks. I mean, except the ones we made."

Like that she's terrified, and winds her arms around herself in some thin form of useless protection. Her friend's gaze is neither sympathetic nor judgmental. In another reality where she weren't half-crazy, they might have worked as something stable and functional, but instead she feels like she's just dragging Alana down a sad, lonely path along with her. "Are you sure you weren't dreaming?" Alana asks. 

She shakes her head, trying and failing to hide how upset she is suddenly. Not that it's difficult to make her this upset nowadays. "Rough few nights," she answers. "Entirely possible. I'm so sorry for wasting your time."

"You're not wasting my time, you're keeping me from being bored." The other woman smiles with half her mouth. "How about you buy me coffee and we call it even?"

Lately Will's been dragged out for a lot of coffee. "Deal," she says, and the plans are set. 

 

-

 

Before she starts, Jack reminds her to shake it off and call them when she's ready and Katz asks her instead if she'd like one of them to stay. She assures the other woman she'll be all right and the two of them leave. 

Then the clock in her head begins to chime, the scene reverses, the colors grow overexposed. She stands disconnected as her shadows disconnects (Tinker Bell at that Halloween party, a little lost girl helping stitch Peter Pan's shadow back to his feet without choice and her repaid debt is damage so brutal she'll never be able to have children even if she wanted them) and tangles with the killer's, sitting in a front row seat. It's with jerky movements that she's back on stage, playing the victim's vocal cords. She feels him, absorbs him through her fabric skin and thinks, I cut you open so I can play you. Through him, she feels an intense sort of hubris neither have ever experienced before.

This is her design. 

Later, to the team, "This is a skilled musician trying a new instrument."

Though she's not looking up from the torn neck of the corpse, she  _feels_ it when the three all exchange uncomfortable but pitying glances (poor little Graham Cracker, the freak of town, the witch who can read minds and has sunflowers living in her head). "How about you go back to sitting down, Will?" Price says, looking down at her. "Can't have you fainting on the body, now can we?"

She does feel faint. Faint and pale and stretched far too thin with thread stitches unraveling. Her head hurts. "Okay," she says, and Katz is already pushing her gently towards a chair.

"Just breathe," she says, shoving Will face forward by the lower back and too many people have been touching her lately. "Everything will be better if you keep breathing, Will."

Violin music tangles with the words in the stuffing of her body and squeezes everything tight.

 

-

 

Every time Will shuts her eyes, she feels the music strumming through her veins as the musician plays his self-declared masterpiece for her. "It's making my head hurt worse than usual," she tells Lecter after they establish the killer was risking getting caught for a serenade. "It won't go away."

Unlike everyone else in the world, he doesn't immediately tell her to take a seat, which she appreciates. She appreciates a lot of things about him and the way he treats her like she has at least some margin of self-control is probably her favorite. "It probably will not until he is caught," he says, hands slipping into his pockets. "From what I have noticed, that is your normal pattern - one I should hope we learn to break."

She nods, though it's not quite true (everyone sinking through her fabric skin, parts getting caught and stuck when they're later pulled out and she's stitched back together, this Raggedy Will thrown to a dollhouse for others to play with). "Even Advil isn't working," she answers. "I think I might be hearing things now, too - and not just the music."

He pauses in his walking. "What is it that you've heard, Will?"

"An animal or something," she says. "It sounded wounded. Alana came over and we looked but I couldn't even find tracks."

There's a moment of silence before he says, "You are overworked. Jack Crawford has you wrapped so tight around these killers that they are going to your head. Are you sure this is an animal you hear?"

(hooves leaving prints in the snow)

"Yes," she says, absolute on this because she's listened to enough humans in pain. "I don't know where my mind pulled it from, but it wasn't some victim I encountered or anything. I might have just been dreaming."

Though these are less sessions and more conversations and he often tells her to come by whenever she wishes, he still does have a schedule to maintain and she has it memorized; his next one will begin shortly. From the way he often acts, she thinks he doesn't like his next one. Having seen the man herself - having  _felt_ the man herself - she can easily imagine why. "I would you like you to call me," he says, "if this continues. You may not want to tell Jack Crawford, but that does not mean you are alone."

Will is drowning and there are times Lecter is the only boat in sight. 

 

-

 

Not Alone, if she's honest with herself, really includes Alana, too. By the time her friend shows up by complete coincidence, Will is shaking and nervous and on the verge of tears. Her hands are covered in plaster dust and the other woman takes on look at her before letting herself in without so much as a hello, let alone asking. 

This leaves Will relieved, as she's not sure she can speak at the moment. 

"There was an animal or something in there," she says when the worlds untangle themselves, form themselves into neat, straight lines. "I tried to see it with a flashlight through the chimney but that didn't work, so I tried to break through the wall because I'm an idiot but I had no idea brick was behind it and it didn't work. I haven't heard it since, though, so maybe it crawled through the top and got out."

"What kind of animal was it?" Alana asks, stepping up next to her. Suddenly she's starting to doubt anything was there in the first place and she shrugs helplessly. With a sigh, her friend adds, "Look, Will, you said during a case, everything sometimes gets trapped in your head. This might be related to that."

The thought hadn't crossed her mind until now and though she supposes it makes sense, that doesn't make her any less unsettled. "I almost want that to be true," she says, looking at the chipped paint wall. "Hearing an animal in my walls is...disquieting. On top of everything else."

There's a moment of quiet contemplation before her friend says, "How about I stay the night? If you hear it again, you'll have someone else hear it too."

"Don't you have a morning appointment?"

"She's a stay-at-home mom. I can reschedule."

Really, Will may not have any experience with friendship, but she knows this is a little excessive. "What are you actually here for, Alana?"

"Well," Alana answers, "now I want to make sure my friend isn't potentially eaten by a rabid raccoon in her sleep. Originally, though, I thought I'd come over, make some noise. Shoo away any predators at your door. So I guess in a way my objectives haven't changed."

Will nods, though she's not sure she believes her. "You really don't have to stay," she says. "Or did Jack send you? He's done before with Katz."

The other woman smiles, sweet and easy. "I don't like listening to Jack when it comes to you," she answers. "That being said, I heard what the case was this time and thought you might like some company. Playing a man's vocal cords is creepy even by our standards and we have a very high bar."

She's not entirely sure this is a better alternative, but she needs verification on whether or not this sound is in her head and trusts Alana more than most people, which might not be saying much. So she agrees, and her friend looks noticeably pleased. 

 

-

 

All appointments are cancelled because of the snow, stranding Lecter at his house, but Will drives an hour in the snow after Alana leaves to see him anyway. "There was no animal in my chimney," she tells him after they establish his guest is gone and no, she doesn't want to eat and yes, he's going to make her a light salad anyway. "It was only in my head."

He looks up from chopping a green pepper. "Alana Bloom confirmed this by staying over your house?"

When she nods, it feels like more of a twitch, and she answers, "I sleepwalk, I get headaches, I'm hearing things - I feel unstable."

She feels tears pushing up at the bottom of her eyes (alone in bed at night, shooting awake with the sound of a voice in her ear promising her to take it all away and she can still feel the blood on her fingers some days and on her neck others), but holds them back. It's difficult. Lector says, "You said yourself what you do is not good for you," and proceeds to chop the pepper.

(Garrett Jacob Hobbs in his living room making dinner for his family with her a mirror at every corner of the house)

"Yeah," she says, "but I'm good for it."

"Are you still hearing this killer's serenade behind your eyes?" Lecter asks. 

Will nearly laughs. "Well, it's out song."

He makes her the salad and she stabs at a piece of lettuce (hours in the dorm bathroom, her roommate holding back her hair because her stomach can't handle the college food.

Everyone's university experience is different, her psychiatrist said)

because she knows otherwise he won't stop staring. 

Lecter pauses as he goes to put back his dish towel before saying, "I hesitate telling you this as it borders on violation of doctor-patient confidentiality." The dish towel ends up back on the counter. "A patient told me today he suspects a friend of his may be involved with the murder at the symphony."

Inside her mind, their song grows louder in volume even though she knows little to nothing about music. "Right, um," she starts to say, but breaks off, tugging instead at one of the curls in her ponytail (Raggedy Will, with homespun silk for curls and recycled thread for stitching). "What did he say about his friend?"

"He owns a music store in Baltimore," Lecter answers, "specializing in string instruments. Perhaps you should interview him."

Their song grows so loud is spills from her head and trickles down through the rest of her body.

 

-

 

When she meets Tobias, the serenade is screaming in her head and then the imagined animal is too. She knows it's fake -  _knows_ for a  _fact_ it is - but excuses herself anyway, thinks the officers are safe. 

She comes back to find both dead and the murderer gone.

By the time discovers the basement and Jack picks up his phone, she's shaking and crying and the music is pounding behind her open eyes. 

 

-

 

[Will Graham is wounded and disoriented when they find her halfway up the stairs of the musician's basement. There are cuts across her neck and hands from what looks like wire traditionally found in places like this and Brian's sure they'll find a whole bunch when they look. He has no idea where the paramedics are, but they better hurry the fuck up.

After Jack kneels down and says something to her, reaching out to prop up her body, he finds Brian with a searching eye and tells him, Handle this.

Traditionally, Graham clean up duty goes to Beverly, but he's not arguing when he swaps places with his boss and rolls her up into his arms. And she must be wearing more layers than he realized, because she's dead light. It's like picking up one of his sister's Raggedy Anne dolls from when he was a kid, but this is Will Graham getting hurt again and he doesn't like the connection. He says, Just hold on a bit long, I'm getting you out of here, and tries not to see the pain that pulls across her face.

From across the room Beverly shouts at him to be careful, and he's already at the door, stuck in high alert. Graham might be nearing freak levels, but she's kind of like a kid sister at the same time and he's not so hot on the idea of her dead]

 

-

 

She pretends she's more healed up than she is when she follows Jack's footsteps into Lecter's office, watching the scene of the killer's body being zipped up into a black plastic bag that looks so similar to the ones used for trash cans. The song, in that moment, goes beautiful silent.

But the notes stay tangled in the stuffing under her skin. 

Looking up at her, Lecter says, "I was worried you were dead."

Everyone else was worried she was dying (metal string pressing into her skin, playing deep into her bones and resounding there just as Tobias desired it too. She feels her sanity dissolving into vapor), but here she is anyway, very much alive. Apparently she missed an entertaining screaming match between Jack, Brian, and two paramedics who tried to stick her with a teenage intern. Now Jack informs Lecter the murderer killed two Baltimore police officers, nearly killed Will, and asks why he came here. Quite frankly, she doesn't care, which is rare after spending so long in the man's head. 

Or perhaps she's just relieved for the respite of leaving it. The victim's burned up too, and her vocal cords no longer feel used up and raw.

"He came to kill my patient," Lecter says, and Will rubs her eye with her wounded hand. Jack gives her a pointed look that means she should sit, but she ignores it (like a child wandering in snow eating pine needles because her imaginary friend said they were okay and all the adults in the room need to correct this wrong). 

"Your patient," she asks. "Was that who Budge was serenading?"

"I don't know. Franklyn knew more than he was telling me." Franklyn was the tip off, Will realizes, and something feels very cold and wrong. "Told Mr. Budge that he didn't have to kill anymore. Then he broke Franklyn's neck, and then he attacked me."

Jack is as blunt as ever when he says, "And you killed him."

Lecter's nod is vague. She wants sleep - a real night's one, not a few hours infested with nightmares of music and stags. "Could Franklyn have been involved in whatever Budge was doing?" she says. 

"I thought this was a simple matter of a poor choice in friends," he answers, eyes turned downward. 

Then Jack says something about this not feeling simple. Before he leaves, he turns to her and adds, "Take a seat before you give me a heart attack, Will. I can't take anything else today." She nods because he deserves that at the very least and he walks away.

Her version of taking a seat is hopping up on Lecter's desk. "I feel like I've dragged you into my world."

"I got here on my own. But I appreciate the company."

For the first time, Will wishes she could take on someone else's pain and swallow it whole. Lecter is a psychiatrist, he didn't sign up for this, doesn't deserve this, and she hates that her curse can't really be a gift and make it all go away.

 

-

 

One moment she's designing her resume, her monument to years of glorious, undetected kills, and the next she's standing in Lecter's officer with no recollection of how she arrived. She's pacing back and forth, panicking and erratic of her lost three and a half hours or more before he grabs her by the upper arms and forces her into a chair, kneeling in front of her because everyone in the world is under the assumption she needs to sit down. "You're disassociating, Will," he says, not letting go (someone holding her down and undoing stitches, removing time for the stuffing in her brain to leave her confused and scared and no, she's not crazy, she tells herself), his grip tight as he tries to ground her, or whatever it is he's trying to do. "It's a desperate survival mechanism for psych-induced repeated abused."

The word abuse, already tangled somewhere inside her, glows red hot and painful behind her ribs, scolding. "Oh, no," she answers, trying to stand up only to be held stationary and maybe this is his form of not letting her run away because that's what she feels like she's about to do. "I'm not abused."

"You have an empathy disorder," he says. "What you feel is overwhelming you."

"I know, I know, I know."

(good things always come in three, her freshman psych professor says as a joke, and proceeds to disprove it for the rest of the year)

He takes one hand away from her arm, moves up to get a light hold on her face, and forces her to look at him (she's always been so  _light_ , so easy to move around and maneuver, and everyone takes advantage of it same as the invisible hand the undoes and fixes the stitches on her body to keep everything shut in tight). "Yet you choose to ignore it," he points out. "That's the abuse I'm referring too."

Self-abuse like self-harm like the eating disorder she doesn't have because she  _does_ eat when she knows it gets too much, or when she remembers, or when someone forces it down her throat because apparently she can't take care of herself. 

Oh god, she's losing time. She's rapidly losing her legitimacy in complaining she can take care of herself. 

"W-what? Do you want to quit?"

"Jack Crawford gave you a chance to quit and you didn't take it," he answers. "Why didn't you take it?"

(silent lecture halls filled with blank staring students reading TattleCrime as the world goes on dying and she could have done something useful.

Instead she's here, and the killers are out there, and she's leaving everyone alone and afraid)

It takes her a moment to gather herself, to untangle the words and piece them together into coherent sentences. "I save lives," she says. 

He looks up at her with eyes thankfully devoid of sympathy, though the worry isn't much better. "And that feels good."

"Generally speaking, yeah."

Finally he lets go of her altogether and backs up. "I'm your friend, Will," he tells her. "I don't care about the lives you save, I care about your life, and your life is separating from reality."

She cradles her head in her hand and realizes for the first time that her whole body  _hurts_ (like it's Peter Pan and she's Tinker Bell with her life her body and her shadow reality and Captain Hook dressed as Jack the Ripper cuts her shadow away at the feet with a violin bow), feeling similar to the aftermath of convulsions she hasn’t had since high school. Very comforting. "I'm sleepwalking, I'm experiencing hallucinations," she says, thinking through her options. "Maybe I should get a brain scan."

"No, Will." His tone's sharper, sharper than she expects and she peeks at him through separated fingers. "Stop looking for answers in the wrong corners." She goes to say something, but he adds, "You were at the crime scene when you disassociated. Tell me about it," before she can.

Lecter says he's worried one day she might wake up and find herself hurt or hurting someone else, and she feels the fear set deep into her bones. 

 

-

 

Abigail has terrible timing with her calls, but she phones so rarely that Will makes it a point to always pick up when she does. 

" _The journalistic was back_ ," she says the moment Will says hell. " _She says she wants to write my story._ "

Will's in her car driving to talk to Jack and see if she did anything stupid and while she doesn't mind hearing from Abigail, the last person she wants to deal with is Freddie Lounds. "Shoo her off, Abbie," she says, pausing at the red light and making an active effort not to check her mirrors unless she absolutely has to. "She'll take whatever you want to say and twist it into something else."

" _Like what she did with you?_ "

"She did  _that_ without so much as talking to any of us."

Apparently Jack had been very angry and Katz gave her an in-depth description as to why she should have been there. Abigail tells her, " _She said it would help people know the truth so everyone would stop thinking I'm such a freak._ "

The light turns green. "Well, take this from someone who is a freak," Will answers. "Sometimes it's easier to get around that yourself. I understand why you want to do it, but you'd have better luck writing it yourself than trusting Freddie Lounds. Because of her, Jack has trouble getting me on crime scenes, and that was with a single article."

" _Really?_ "

"Unfortunately."

A pause. Then, " _I'm going to tell her I don't want it. Are you coming by soon?_ "

"Yes, some time within the week," she says because now she can't promise Tuesday, though that's what she wanted as it's the day after Alana goes. Since yesterday she hasn't lost time again, but one day isn't enough to judge anyway. If she, hypothetically, hadn't been acting strange, maybe she should tell Jack. He has the right to know his "best" is steadily cracking. "I'll see you then, Abbie. Be careful with Lounds."

" _Don't worry, I think I can take someone where leopard print leggings, Will._ "

Will laughs, quiet but genuine and rare, and she hears Abigail truly giggle like her age requires for the first time. It's nice.

 

-

 

In the end, she doesn't tell Jack.

 

-

 

There are seventeen bodies, Katz says, and Will's only absorbing two reflections. The monument builder is elated at his creation, feels so damn pleased at having kept this perfect kill for last, and the victim has the typical Fear Repulsion Denial until the very final moment that every single one of them she encounters has. His body's bent and broken in death, but the knife hurt when it slipped into his chest, and his dead eyes look at her accusingly. 

_You should have saved me._

Too bad she isn't saving much of anyone these days. 

(Garrett Jacob Hobbs blinks when she blinks and tells her she's ruined Abigail as he cuts her throat) 

 

-

 

First there's a classroom full of students, but then Alana is there and she's just rehearsing alone because all the seats are empty and you're looking for answers in all the wrong corners, Lecter said. Her friend makes it clear without preamble that this is ambush, and Will thinks that hearing things is punishment enough. Instead of sitting, because everyone always makes her sit, she leans back against the desk. The edge digs into her lower back and this is an easier way to hide the way her hands shake at the realization she was teaching a class that never existed. 

"I had a session with Abigail today," Alana says, putting down coffee because everything seems to think Will needs coffee (dark smudges drawn under her eyes with charcoal, perfect messes made by imperfect hands that thought words and sunflower petals and mushrooms and glass shards were good for the interior body). "She told me what she asked you. And what you said. Surprisingly diplomatic."

Of course it was surprising; when no one lets you create decisions for yourself, you don't have many chances to make your choices. "What do you think about it?" she asks, and she hadn't thought Abigail would discuss it with anyone else

"I told her you're dealing with a long term case, with is true, so we should wait until that's resolved," the other woman answers, taking a seat in Will's chair, "and that she had to stop skipping group."

Will blows on her coffee and says, "She wants to use my name as her last one and on applications. Seeing Wilhelmina Graham on a college app could be as bad as her biological father’s."

When Alana hands over her little smile, Will wonders what she would say if she knew she lost time the other day. "Freddie Lounds never uses your full name," her friend points out. "Look, I told you once that you couldn't be her everything, but Abigail obviously wants you to be something. There are a lot of complications with this, but I'm not getting in the way of that."

"I killed her father. There has to be a psychological term for this."

Leaning forward, Alana tells her, "Sometimes, Will, it  _is_ possible for someone to like you just for being you. The circumstances you meet people under are traditionally pretty weird to begin with."

Everything hangs suspended on strings, the temptation close but the seventeen murders are still making connections in her mind (like mushrooms, but they grow real tall and jumble one on top of the other until a totem pole of perverse creation is left to stand at the open shore), and this leaves her with a headache and worsening confusion about the class that never was. "You were right the first time," she says. "I can't be. I can't be a mother, especially to an eighteen-year-old orphan whose father tried to kill her."

"Abigail is steadily getting back to stability -" Yes, yes she is, even Will has noticed that but what she needs and what she wants are two different things. Wasn't it Alana who said that? "- but the two of you have a lot of problems that would work off of each other. Still, that doesn't mean there's any harm in her using your name. She wants to move forward, and she wants to use you as a pathway to do it."  After a moment, Alana sighs and adds, "You're allowed to care too, Will. You're only thirteen years older than her, so that's more of an older sister if you want to think about it that way."

She has thought about it (waking up alone in a hospital room to a nurse pouring at sympathy from chipped nail polish fingers who says, The scarring is too severe. You'll never be able to have children), but has, at the same time, shied away from it. "I just don't want her to get hurt," she says eventually, because she sleepwalks and has headaches and loses times and feels altogether unstable on any given day, "but if she really wants the last name Graham, she can have it."

"We'll talk about it once she's improved a little more and Jack cuts you some breathing room."

Will nods and when her cell phone goes off, it's Jack's name on the caller ID. 

Abigail Graham. Abbie Graham. She thinks she can get used to that if Abigail can. 

 

-

 

When Abigail IDs Nicholas Boyle, Will is stuck downstairs discussing the murders with the team, hyperaware of how extensively Jack must be questioning her and how afraid she must be. After, she and Alana take Abigail out a diner, even though none of them have much appetite, because apparently something discussed less than a day ago and agreed not to bring up again until a later date is the closest thing they have to compensation for going through this. 

Really, Will never thought she'd be used as a positive before. 

"You mean this," Abigail says, looking back and forth between the two of them. She doesn't wear scarves anymore, the scar instead hidden by nothing but her hair. "I thought you were going to tell me no."

Will blinks, and the stag walks casually past the window, weaving through the crowds on the sidewalks and the diner is nearly empty at this time of day. Unfortunately, Abigail will have to go back soon but she tells herself she'll check her out for the night again when she can. "Alana talked some sense into me," she says with a weak smile and her friend is very smug about it. "Still, Abbie, you need to be sure. College wouldn't be for another year at least and your fellow students are unlikely to know my name, but your teachers...well, I'm not very well liked in the academic circle."

But Abigail just blinks, all knobby teenage shoulders and brown hair covering a thinly veiled past Will can understand wanting to give up because she sees it in her dreams, too. "Well, no one likes me period because they all think I'm like my dad," she says. "I don't care what my teachers think about you if you save people. At least you don't wear cheetah print leggings."

"Or ponchos," Alana adds, sipping her orange juice. "If you're referring to Freddie Lounds' fashion sense, she has a poncho fetish that no one I know shares." When Abigail smiles, she's still holding back tears and Will unfortunately isn't all that surprised Jack put her through that. Not everyone gets special privileges that are usually more condescending than helpful. "Doing the actual paperwork while you're still in the hospital will make records complicated unless you start applying for schools while you're there," her friend adds. "It would be easier to wait until you're out."

Abigail nods, certainly more relaxed than she was when they first entered, though there's still a panic behind her eyes. "Can I stay checked out for the whole night?" she asks, not unexpectedly. "The other girls - no one else is in there for something like this and I don't want to be alone."

Until Alana says, "How about we spend the day together? Extended session. Then you can spend the night with her," that Will realizes exactly how angry with Jack she must be because this is Alana Bloom, practical and cautious, especially with Abigail, but suddenly saying it's all right to take a day trip outside the walls.

It also isn't until they get everything settled and go their separate ways that Will realizes Alana trusts Abigail with her more than Lecter, and she thinks this must really be a first.

 

-

 

Slowly - very slowly, that is - Will is learning a concept of family she never had before (disappointed eyes of a poor father who once ruffled curls and called her his Raggedy Will, the mother she never met and the aunt in San Francisco they actively avoided because she moved to Hawaii and opened up a shop where all the photos were of her cat in a ballerina's dress), and that makes the Joel Summers snuggle in beside his biological father inside the cold corner of her mind where she used to keep the psychos locked in. Now they all come tumbling out, spilling from her head and drowning her from the inside. 

She and Jack find Lawrence Wells giving himself up with open arms and pleased acceptance with boxes packed behind him. He confesses to seventeen murders easy as can be (drowning too, but in hubris, believing he created something that worthwhile when all she saw was a mess of gore and sickness), says jail will be a luxury for him because he's establishing his legacy. "Well, that's one way to be remembered," Will says from the window. "No children to tell your story - Did Joel Summers remember his father?"

"No anymore," Wells answers, eyebrows raising. 

Jack asks, "Did you have an affair with Eleanor Marshall before you murdered her?" Will isn't looking, but she hears nothing. "From your silence, I'm going to take that as a yes."

(back in Wolf Trap, Alana and Abigail in the house alone waiting for her to return)

"He was your son," she tells him, walking closer until she's standing over him, hyperaware of Jack at her back, that ever protective figure ready to jump for her if anything goes sideways. "Joel Summers. You thought the woman you loved was having Fletcher Marshall's baby when she should've been having yours, but you got it the wrong way 'round. Eleanor chose to raise him as Fletcher Marshall's child rather than yours so maybe  _she_ saw what was in your  _heart_."

(like a little sister, like a daughter, like family. Will doesn't really care anymore) 

"You thought you were securing your legacy," Jack says from behind her. "You murdered it."

"In fact," Will adds, "your one act as a father was to destroy your son."

(first she's a mirror and she's slitting Abigail's throat but then she's a mirror and Garrett Jacob Hobbs is slitting hers.

What a world of wonderful fathers this is.

She's not much better as a mother)

 

-

 

Abigail Hobbs killed Nicholas Boyle. 

Abigail Hobbs killed Nicholas Boyle.

Abigail Hobbs killed Nicholas Boyle. 

Lecter convinces her to stay inactive. Will never thought she'd spent the night awkwardly comforting a sobbing Abbie crying about how she wanted to say something but Dr. Lecter made her promise she wouldn't for her own protection.

And Lecter is her friend, so she ignores the nagging doubt that plants itself beside the mushroom still trapped inside her mind.

 

-

 

"I think I'm hurting myself when I lose time," she admits in the safety of Lecter's office as she hands over the drawn clock (there's one inside her brain that goes tick-tock, tick-tock when she needs to become the killer and in the end becomes the victim, too) and reminds herself who she is, where she is, and when she is. "Whenever I wake up - come out of it, however I should say it - my whole body is always aching."

He slips out the pen so the notebook shuts itself neatly. "Have you found any evidence of harming yourself?" he asks her. 

"Occasional bruises," she answers, brushing her bangs out of her face. "I must have fallen once, because there was one on my temple. Nothing terribly big, though. Just aches, like I've spent all day running."

"Simply bruises?" She nods. "You are one of the most graceful people I have met in a long time, Will. Perhaps when you experience this loss of time, you lose some bodily control as well."

The thought isn't a comforting, but it's the first one that makes real sense to her. He puts a comforting hand on her shoulder and rubs his thumb in circles above a bruise. They stay this way until the phone rings, and Katz invites her over for a night of beer and movies with the boys that Lecter convinces her to attend. 

 

-

 

[Jack rushes in from the hall with the others the moment he hears the bang, and finds Will sprawled out on her stomach on the floor. Her one arm is bent at an uncomfortable angle, thrown over the vic's body with her fingers pressed straight into the blade of the murder weapon. He knows she's been having trouble lately, but passing out is a new one.

She wakes up as Brian goes to pick her up and it happens in slow motion - her eyes blinking open, focusing on Beth LeBeau's Glasgow smile, face twisting in horror when she realizes what she's touching. She screams and scrambles up, Brian barely missing her and her back hits hard against the dresser. Beverly is at the door, ready to scare off any local cops who get too curious. 

The killer can't see faces, Will says, and her eyes are still caught Deer in Headlights wide as Brian tries to check her head for possible injury. He tried to peel back her face like a mask.

Behind Jack, Beverly says, It's none of your business. Get the fuck out before we make you.

There's dead tissue on the handle of the knife, says Jimmy. Fresh blood on the blade. Brian, fix her hand.

Will is shaking and Will is bleeding and Will won't shut up explaining. She just contaminated a crime scene by fainting and Jack doesn't know if this is a mental sensory overload or her has something to do with the abrupt weight loss he hadn't noticed until last night. Maybe it's time he has another conversation with Hannibal] 

 

-

 

Her name is Will Graham. She's in Baltimore, Maryland. It's February 20, 2013, at 2:18pm. Hannibal Lecter's office is uncomfortably cold. 

"Jack tells me you fainted at the crime scene," Lecter says, accepting the clock notebook from her shaking hand (Beth LeBeau's dead eyes and bloody smile, snowfall ceiling and when you peel off the mask, all she has is a mirror tucked beneath her skin) without comment. "He is worried, and under the impression he has broken you."

(she's a ragdoll with her a stitch-closed smile, changing shape every time it's done and undone. Her normal string does not like smiles, pulling out sunflower petals and leaving glass shards and harsh edged words and rough waves trying to wash her away. 

The killer undid the stitches the create a smile and forgot to sew it closed)

Will adjusts the way she sits. "He didn't break me." She's already broken.

He closes his hands together and leans forward. He's not threatening and always calm, easier to handle after painful crime scenes than Jack or any of the team who act like she's some delicate figurine about to break. Shatter into a million shards created by ten bullet holes or disintegrate into sam that the tide will take away. He keeps her from losing time, because he’s a small safe place to store the secrets that the monsters can't reach. 

He asks her, "What did you see? What were you afraid to tell them?"

"The kill wasn't savage, it was lonely," she answers, but she's thinking about Beth LeBeau and how she felt, screaming at her murderer to stop as her mouth was cut open wide. "Desperate, sad. When I woke up - when Zeller woke me up - I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked right  _through_ me. Past me. As if I was just a stranger."

Except she hadn't been a stranger to Beth, who recognized her with unclouded, living eyes until she carved the life out of her.

Then Lecter is there, in front of her. She hadn't seen him move. "You need to confront your limitations with what you do," he says, "and how it affects you."

"If by 'limitations' you mean the difference between sanity and insanity," she answers, "I don't accept that."

"What do you accept?"

"I know what kind of crazy I am," she says, feeling her normal sort of anxiety start to bubble, "and this isn't that kind of crazy. This could be seizures, or a tumor, a blood clot -" She's fishing for possible answers, but each other is sounding weaker and weaker.

Lecter is distinctly resigned and oh, that just makes her feel  _awful._ "I can recommend a neurologist," he tells her, "but if it isn't physiological, then you have to accept that what you're struggling with is mental illness." She looks down, doesn't verbally agree and agrees nonetheless, and he adds, "What happened at the crime scene might be a much less complicated matter. When is the last time you've eaten, Will?"

She swallows down feelings of sickness at the mention of food. After getting her hand bandaged because she fell on a dead body and murder weapon, she wants to eat even less than usual, but it's not as though she has the capability to say this after agreeing to a brain scan. "I don't remember," she says honestly. "I lost time before Jack's phone call."

"Well, then," Lecter says, "you will come home with me and I'll make you something light while I call for an appointment."

Even though she doesn't like it, she knows this is the best deal she's going to get, so she agrees to this, too.

 

-

 

For the first moment coming out of the MRI, Will stays silent and stationary, watching the Angel Maker suspend her from violin on ceilings, until someone touches her and it's enough to get her screaming. And she doesn't calm down until Lecter's hand is on her shoulder and he's reminding her, in a quiet voice, of who she is, where she is, and when she is. Angel Maker disappears and so does the music behind her eyes and in Beth LeBeau's house, first the victim was her and then it was Abigail and that is what scared her the most. She says she wants to call Abbie. 

Normally she can't handle physical contact all that well, but lately she's been able to use it as a grounding point because these people are  _alive_  and  _want_ to be around her, and she begins to feel calm when he pulls her closer and tucks her against him (six years old and having a nightmare about Mary Louise eating her grandfather's favorite cat and her dad is there and -). He says, "Whatever you saw, I'm sure Abigail is fine where she is. Calling her will only make her worry."

Her breathing comes in shallow (gasping on the floor with her neck split as a man with ten bullet wounds in his chest plays runs a bow over her vocal cords and mushrooms bloom from her fingernails), making her feel worse. "I know," she says, "I just -" (on the floor with her mouth stitched shut but someone ripping away the yarn with a different needle to create another, pulling out mirror pieces and words to create their desired shape of a grotesque smile) "- don't particularly like feeling trapped. I guess my mind disagreed with sliding me in there, too."

(her friend wearing a nightgown and she's oh so lonely here under the bed, ankle drawing near and she lashes out, drawing the woman in closer, but then it's a scalpel and she's carving out a nurse's eyes)

"How about you get dressed and we can speak with Dr. Sutcliffe?" Lecter asks, and she's suddenly it's brought to her attention that all she has on is a medical gown over her underclothes, which leaves her the closest to naked she's been around anyone beside those two cops in years. "Do you think you can stand?"

(this has to be the perfect example of Double Vision)

She nods, though it's more of a bodily stutter, and he helps her off the table before leaving her alone to put back on her normal clothes. And since she knows bad things come in any number (even seventeen, like the bodies stacked on a monument created from a misunderstanding), she barely finds it in her to be surprised when she finds out there's nothing wrong with her head. 

 

-

 

"Why call me?" Katz asks, just like Alana weeks before in Wolf Trap, Virginia, but right now they're in Greenwood, Maryland and her name is Will Graham. "Why not Jack? Why not the police?"

Everything feels a little hazy, similar to right before she fainted the last time she was in this house, and she can't remember the last time she ate (don't take medication on an empty stomach or I'll be forced to take action, the psychiatrist said), but she supposes that's not particularly important at the moment. "I called you," she says slowly, "because I'm not entirely sure what I saw was real and you're the only one who will not instantly panic because of that."

Katz is afraid of her or for her, she's not sure, but part of her also knows it's true; Will's far from stupid and she's cataloged everyone reaction to her. Jack's is the worst, but Zeller and Price aren't much better, and the police will have a far more negative reaction than she knows how to deal with at the moment. "Then let's prove it," the other woman says, hand on her hip. 

Will tries to think through the haze, but it's difficult. "I grabbed her arm," she tells her, "and an entire layer of dead skin separated from the underlying tissue - like she was wearing a glove." Like toy makers or butchers or intelligent killers or law enforcement trying to solve the crime. 

"That's why she doesn't bleed."

With a nod, she says, "There's no circulation, there's nothing alive in the tissue to bind it," and catches herself as a mirror reflection on the floor, a corpse cutting into a corpse and some days she feels like she's fading, but not quite dead yet. Then she shakes her head and it's gone.

Katz asks, "What did you do with it?"

Again, she tries to sift through the haze, but this time everything is too muddled for her to see. "I don't know," she says, which is followed by an incredulous, "You can't  _remember?_ " 

They start discussing physical illnesses, and right then Will knows this isn't physical because the killer is a reflection of her and what went sideways is a disease of the mind and not the body. This time, in a way, the murderer is a victim in her own right, too.

 

-

 

Jack...Well, Jack really does treat her like more of his daughter than a random child sometimes and it's only recently that she's begun to notice it. She just wishes he weren't so obvious. His occasional I Need to Protect You talks - while helpful and, to a certain degree, reassuring - make her uncomfortable. 

She knows the moment she walks into the room that this is going to be another one. 

"Managing your expectations?"

" _Changing_ my expectations," he clarifies, pushing off the desk and turning towards her. "You know, when Miriam Lasse died, I had to come back here to this office and pack up, but that got to be too overwhelming. I thought I should just leave, seeing as I got a trainee killed. That lack of leadership on my part? That was my responsibility."

 _Responsibility_. She and his team are his subordinates, yes, but they're also adults. "You didn't kill Miriam Lasse," she tells him, because sometimes she needs to remind herself of something similar a hundred times a day, "the Chesapeake Ripper did."

But Jack just shakes his head. "It didn't feel that way to me. I pulled her out of a classroom. Just I pulled you out of a classroom."

"She was a student," Will says. "I'm a teacher -"

"I'm still just as responsible for you as I was for her." She knows for a fact he doesn't have this conversation with any of the others. Just her. Insanity gets special privileges. 

She doesn't want special privileges. "I'll take my own responsibility -"

"Well, not from me you won't. We can do it together," he answers, staring her down and forcing eye contact, something he knows she can't stand. Lecter does it too. "I broke the rules with Miriam. I encouraged her to break the rules. I'm breaking the rules with you now."

This whole thing is not something she wants to deal with.  _Breaking the rules_ is not something she wants to hear. "By letting an unstable agent do field work?"

"Special Agent. That means you represent the FBI. You still represent me."

"Have I misrepresented you, Jack?"

"No, no," he cuts in. "But you have me curious. Why are you still here when the both of us know that  _this is bad for you?_ "

Her bottom lip catches her teeth, the skin so chapped from the cold they almost tear and this is the last thing she wants. Everything is crumbling into sand, all the glass turning back into its original state while a living woman who thinks she's dead wanders the streets and Will has  _nothing_ physically wrong with her. She doesn't want to argue with Jack. She just wants Jack to act like Jack, and even if that means treating her like a kid, at least that doesn't mean raising his voice. 

And she hates that her own voice catches a little when she asks, "Do you want me to quit?"

Again, he shakes his head. "No, you had an opportunity to quit. You didn't take it," he answers. "Why not?" She hesitates, and when she doesn't answer right away he continues, "Let me tell you what I think. I think the work you do here has created a sense of stability for you. Stability is good for you, Will."

"Stability requires a strong foundation, Jack. Mine is built on sand -"

"I'm not sand," he says, and she hadn't realize he meant himself, that this whole conversation of I Need to Protect You actually boils do to the  _I_ and the  _You_  instead of mixed with a broader scheme of things. "I am bedrock. When you doubt yourself, you don't have to doubt me too."

Bedrock. Bed -

Rock. 

Bedrock. 

Oh. 

Jack has a point. Her fingers twitch when she nods. "I'm sure Dr. Lecter told you about the MRI," she says, looking down. "I guess I'm just - scared."

He pinches the bridge of his nose and tells her, "You have my number. I dragged you into this, which mean's that's open any time for you, got it?" Nod. Twitch. "Good. Now go get something to eat. You aren't as good at hiding as you think you are."

Then he walks out, and that finally order is almost enough to push her over the edge into tears. She feels so weak it psychically hurts. 

 

-

 

She spends an embarrassingly long time screaming before calling up Jack. Screw it if anyone thinks she's ever trying to handle this on her own.

Apparently they don't, because Katz talks her through calming down, and they don't ask for her help beyond what she remembers.

 

-

 

After convincing Georgia to stay put, she calls Katz. "I'm not hallucinating," she says. "One hundred percent real. Please get - someone."

Katz calls the police who come with the sirens off so as not to spoke Georgia into running away. She does try, though, once they're in, and the officer Will met months earlier offers to bring her to the hospital too. She declines, because Jack calls her and says to get her ass to Baltimore and lets her know the woman is being transferred to a hospital in Maryland. As much as her disorder forces her the empathize with Georgia and as much as she genuinely understands her, Will seriously debates asking Alana to stay with her for a few days after because she doesn't want to be alone after that. 

Luckily for her, her friend extends the invitation first. Will also decides that she's grown an appreciation for hugs from the right people and Alana is one of them.

(middle school in New Orleans when the girls at school decided she was a freak same as the neighbors and her dad got distant and people stopped touching her altogether. 

Maybe it had nothing to do with empathy disorder at all)

 

-

 

Abel Gideon's heartbeat pounds in her ears over the steady ticking of her internal clock and the people disappear (the people are always the last to go, clinging like grief or cigarette smoke to the scene because her mind is afraid to give them up and lose them completely) into nothing, the separated part of her retracing his steps. Inside are a cop and a male nurse who are not who she prefers, but they will do, and all she needs is one hand. The officer jumps first, the nurse second and the fight is bloody and rough and then they're dead. 

She carves out their organs and hangs them like ornaments on the trees. The Graham girl and FBI will make sure the Ripper gets her calling card. 

When she blinks away from Gideon and their heartbeats lose their perfect sync, Jack is next to her. "Does Abel Gideon still think he's the Chesapeake Ripper?" he asks. 

(organs as presents tied to tree branches for the FBI to find when they come searching. The cop was more shocked and indignant than afraid and the nurse was resigned to his fate, always knew this is how he'd die. It was the driver who panicked)

"Abel Gideon is having a difference of opinion about who he is," she answers, slipping her hands into her pockets. "The man who escaped from that van was not in the same state of mind when he did this."

Katz walks over, stepping over bloody lines left from dripping organs in the crisp white snow, and lists off what Gideon stole. From the trees, Price says, "He tied little bows with some of them."

"It's pretty impressive," Zeller agrees, picking up a fallen one. These are presents and jabs at the same time directed at two different people. 

"The Chesapeake Ripper would not have left the organs behind," she says. 

Jack turns to her. "If Abel Gideon is not the Chesapeake Ripper," he answers, "then he could be trying to get his attention."

Calling cards and jabs (here I am and you can't catch me and are you real or was it really me all along). "Local PD picked up a foot trail leading out of the woods," Katz says before she can answer. "Boot soles are consistent with the ones we found at the crime scene."

As it turns out, Abel Gideon is heading back to Baltimore. Jack gets Alana on the phone and tells Will she's going with her. Despite her distaste for mental hospitals, for once she doesn't disagree.

 

-

 

After Jack gives his speech about Gideon being armed and dangerous and hours after she stops her friend from getting into a full on argument with an idiot, he pulls her into his office and gives her a cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwich bought at the cafeteria downstairs. "You've been shaking since before we made it to the crime scene," he says. "I don't want a repeat of Greenwood, Will."

Perhaps it was unrealistic, but Will hadn't thought anyone outside of Lecter would notice (twiggy limbs from skipped meals, Dad too poor to pay for everything and as a kid she was one of the few who didn't complain about school lunches). Or maybe no one did notice and he told. The thought makes her angry, but this is considered "self-destructive" and she has no family; Jack as her boss who treats her like a fucked up form of a daughter is the closest she has to family outside of Abigail now. Of course he'd be the one to know. 

"Okay," she says blankly. "Have we found anything new on Gideon?"

Jack takes the seat across from her and doesn't shut up until she's done, which does nothing but make her feel even more childish than usual. Half an hour later she's throwing up in the bathroom because she ate too fast and hadn't meant to. 

 

-

 

In Lecter's office, she stabilizes, or something close to it, and explains about the antlers and the heartbeat and how she doesn't feel the same. He says she's fears insanity above all else, and she has no real ability to deny this. Behind him, the statue of the stag moves its head to look at her and she drops her eyes. She's fading, she's changing, she feels crazy - what she really wants is to disappear. 

Then he says she has him as her gauge and it's like Jack with his little bedrock speech. She almost tells him about earlier, but keeps it to herself. It just seems safer that way. 

 

-

 

She finds Alana after they decide to pin agents for protections all around her and no one mentions that technically Will spoke to Gideon, too. Her friend is in her classroom putting books away, and smiles when she sees her. 

"Are you my protective custody?" she asks, but it doesn't quite sound like a joke.

Will shakes her head. "You'll be getting a real FBI agent," she answers. "Not a teacher with a temporary badge." Who sees water dripping from walls in rooms filled with corpses and her boss surrounded by antlers or throws up after eating one sandwich because her body hates her as much as her mind. She's adapting to insanity quicker than she probably should. 

Alana still has that small, private smile on her face. "Too bad," she says. "I like your dogs. Would've been fun to have another movie night cozying up with them."

"You don't need protective custody to do that," Will says. "You just need one of us freaked out enough to want the extra company."

"You know, the invitation extends both ways," Alana tells her, walking over and she looks like she's about to say something else before getting distracted, reaching over to slip her hand under Will's bangs and against her forehead (school nurse at seven-years-old calling her dad home early from work so she can pick up his daughter who ultimately got half the grade sick. Poor little Graham Cracker can't even afford antibiotics) to check her temperature. "You feel really warm."

(waking up freezing in the middle of the night only to turn up the heat and sunflowers grow best in the summer, the stems bursting inside her as she tries to sleep and popping her organs, too ruined to hang with bows from trees)

Crossing her arms, she says, "I tend to run hot," because she can't think of much else and the sound of her heartbeat grows louder. "They stay stress raises body temperature."

They. Who's  _they?_ It's something that always bothered her, that loose pronoun used for everything that really explains nothing in the end. Alana says, "Maybe you should take an aspirin."

She slips her hand into her pocket, pulls out the bottle and shakes it so rattles like rain against a window or a mirror left outside in a shallow grave. "Way ahead of you."

There's a moment of silence before her friend asks, "They're going to kill Gideon, aren't they?"

"Whatever happens to him has nothing to do with you," she answers, maybe too quickly but sometimes she feels like she's already dragged down Alana too deep into her world. If she's going down, she doesn't want to bring anyone with her. 

 

 

-

 

So Gideon has Freddie Lounds and the Ripper is helping with murder investigations. Will is steadily feeling more and more physically ill and the day progresses. After being inside both their heads’, two psychiatrists', a nurse's, a cop's, and a driver's, she's not in the mood to keep fighting. The Double Vision is getting harder to control. And she thinks Jack must know this because he keeps her in the car after giving her an entire lecture on taking better care of herself and keeping her immune system up. She's too tired to remind him she's thirty one, not a child and not his daughter. 

Then Jack is gone, too far into the building to call for, and she is completely alone (locked inside a circular room in her mind and it's like that riddle  _who killed the man?_ and the answer is the maid because she lied and said she was cleaning corners when there are no corners and now Will didn't kill anyone but the stitches are her lies and they're unraveling faster and faster), so she takes her chances, grabs her gun, and runs. There's a skip and a jump somewhere along the way because she's in Lecter's house and Gideon's sitting in a chair. Angry, angry bees are buzzing in her brain, diving after sunflower seeds and Lecter is there close, holding the side of her face like he does sometimes to keep her from panicking too badly. But she shouldn't be here because where's Jack and she lost time and  _how_ is she here because her gun's gone too (away, maybe not there in the first place, just a word now, lacking Rs and Es but still painful and crushed inside her palm).

"You came here  _alone_ , Will," he's saying, voice barely loud enough to reach above the noise inside her brain, raising in volume like a song or a thunderstorm but Abel Gideon is right there and she's shaking her head and oh god, where's Jack, where's Alana, she'd almost rather be dreaming but this is not a dream. 

"Don't lie to me," she tells him, not even ashamed that she's crying. "Please don't lie to me."

His grip on her tightens. "Jack is hunting down Abel Gideon where Miriam Lasse died," he says. "You came here alone, Will."

"What's happening to me?"

"Will. Will? You're having an episode." His voice gets lost inside the storm (a tornado riccochetting, pulling up her insides and the stitching her falling apart, leaving her bare), harder to hear. "Will? Will?"

Everything goes dark, after that, and she's lost to the storm.

 

-

 

She was in Jack's car last she checked, but he wouldn't leave her sprawled out in the back like this and also it's in general different. A gun's in a front seat and her hands aren't bound but her head hurts, so whoever grabbed her obviously didn't think she'd be awake any time soon. 

Pulling herself up to sitting position, she finds herself in a direct line of view of Alana Bloom's house and the distinct figure of Abel Gideon walking towards it. Instinct takes over, despite the humming in her brain (her mind drags up what feels like a fake memory of her legs giving out in Lecter's house but that can't be true, it just can't, because Gideon didn't just make a stop of Will Graham's psychiatrist), and she scrambles into the front seat, grabbing her gun and climbing out. He stripped off her coat and her glasses are gone and so are her shoes and she can't find it in her to care that there's snow going up to mid-shin. The gun's hers, which means no muffler, and she doesn't need to see to alert the guards inside Alana's house that anyone's outside. 

Abel Gideon transforms into the blurry outline of Garrett Jacob Hobbs when she gets near (except his dead eyes staring still crystal clear and he's after Alana and something in her brain is telling her Abigail is next,  but she's next too and she's so deeply wrapped in two people she can't decide who's who or who she is or what's up and what's down or where the ocean is) and when she shoots, the shot inevitably goes wide. From inside comes the sound of shouting voices, but inside her head is a raging thunderstorm, and unconscious in the snow because she even sees him raise his gun.

 

-

 

[It takes two shots to take down Abel Gideon because of his coat, and his own bullet barely misses his intended target by an inch. Alana wraps Will in her own and decides to have a talk with Jack about leaving her alone. They should know by now that never ends well]

 

-

 

[When Jack says, with utter certainty, that Will's going to make it through the night, it has nothing to do with true faith in her. He just can't stand the idea that he might have created another Miriam Lasse, and refuses to believe that there's even a possibility she can die.

He's not allowed to spend long in the hospital room because the whole scene is nothing but doctors and nurses rushing around like a bad episode of  _House_. The best he can do is share a drink with Hannibal and hand over Freddie Lounds duty to his team, who all take it without complaint. After what she went through, she'll probably be looking for a story to make herself feel better and who better to blame than Will Graham? Since she has no family, medical decisions until she regains consciousness fall to him because he's Jack Crawford and he has a badge he can flash around. The lead doctor doesn't like him very much.

Will makes it through the night, but she doesn't wake up. Somehow Freddie Lounds comes out with a paragraph long blurb anyway and apparently Abigail bitched at the hospital nurses until Hannibal checked her out for a few hours so she could come. Jack wishes this could turn into a feel good family movie and that could be enough to wake her up, but she doesn't. 

All they can do is wait]

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

-

 

"I need you to tell us what you remembered, Will."

Jack, Katz, Keller, and Price surround her hospital bed, though she knows the other two don't need to be here and it's making her feel boxed in (MRI, unable to move, caught in hallucinations of every kill she's dealt with since she rejoined the force), but she doesn't comment. Instead she focuses on trying to remember. "Everything is blurry from the fever," she answers, rubbing her forehead and hating the tug on the needle in her arm that she's not allowed to remove. She hates hospitals and always has. "I was waiting for you like you said and I saw Gideon leave through a side exit and that's it. Next thing I know, I'm waking up in the back of his car and there's a gun on the passenger seat. I don't think he expected me to wake up. Why me?"

Everyone has a general exchange of looks. "The theory is that you were going to be his next victim," Katz says after a moment. "You're not a psychiatrist, but you did technically interrogate him."

"Then why save me for last? Why not kill me and then go for Alana?"

"You're a member of the FBI assigned to his case," Jack says. "There's a possibility he thought you would be the most...climactic." 

No, there was something else. Something else happened, but she can't remember. Keller says, "Well, he's dead, so it's not like it matters. You can heal up without an armed guard outside your door."

"Yeah, that sounds much more relaxing. How's Chilton?"

They tell her he'll live, but he's stuck in recovery for a while, and she'll be stuck in the hospital for a while too until her fever goes down. Jack threatens to throw her back if she signs herself out AMA before it at least breaks. He also stays longer than the others and apologizes right before he leaves. 

 

-

 

So Lecter told Jack who must have told Alana because she shows up with soup not from the hospital on her first visit. Today is the first day time Will is allowed to have food outside of what can be dripped through an IV. Whatever the hospital is doing to lower her body temperature is making her feel awful, weighing down her mind and her body simultaneously. More than once she's gotten up to walk around, much to the annoyance of the staff, because the hospital bed leaves her feeling trapped. It was by accident that she stumbled across Georgia Madchen, and she certainly hadn't meant to talk to her. 

(sometimes I have nightmares where I'm watching a man without a face kill the doctor. I don't want to remember)

As she takes her required first sip, Alana says, "After you get out, you should go see Abigail. She came to visit you before you woke up."

Will pauses. "Jack let Abigail Hobbs see me?"

"Jack was so worried I don't think he cared," her friend answers. "You aren't allowed to do this again, you know. Scare us all like that."

"I'm sorry." Will may not remember much, but she knows how it ended and still feels the phantom chill. "How are you doing?"

She takes a few more sips, feels the warmth spread down her body. "Well, I'm alive, so here's a belated thank you I should have said immediately," Alana says, "but I'll be a lot better once you're out."

Of all the times she's been to the hospital in the past fifteen years, she's never had someone waiting for her (checking out AMA, struggling to get herself dressed as the doctor watches with sad eyes filled with the realization that this teenage girl has no one who cares), with the exception of getting stabbed, but all Jack did was shove her over to the mercy of psychiatrists. "Soon," she says. "Once my fever drops. Until now I'm stuck."

"You're not stuck, you're getting help. It would work a lot better if you didn't keep -"

There's a quiet knock on the wall and when she looks up, Lecter is standing in the doorway. "It is a relief to see your eyes to clear, Will," he says and she doesn't put the soup to the side like she was about to. "May I enter?"

Before Will can answer, Alana says, "How about I leave for now? I don't want to crowd you."

"I can come back later."

"I think I can handle two people."

They both ignore her. After months of treating her like an equal and an adult, one hospital trip ruined everything. Alana insists Will needs her sleep, so she'll be back tomorrow and see if she can coordinate getting Abigail on the phone, and leaves. Lecter takes her seat and he and Will speak until she starts to nod off. Before he exits too, he asks how Georgia Madchen is doing after Will casually mentioned they had talked. She tells him what the woman said. 

(a man with no face haunting her dreams)

This is her mistake.  

 

-

 

Then Georgia Madchen is dead and Will doesn't know why no one else can see all the connections (mushrooms beginning to grow from fingertips and spreading from there, connecting across the body until all the separate plants join), but Jack forces her to go home for the night and Alana suggests she checks out Abigail. She thought this would make the hours pass a little easier, but figuring out the girl who has more or less become a younger sister played bait to a series of murderers through a hallucination is not what she would consider easy. 

"He used to say it would be them or me," Abigail tells her, eyes spilling over with tears. "I was going to tell you, and about Nick Boyle, but Dr. Lecter made me promise."

Will's finding it hard to breathe and she knows she should be panicking more about Abigail and reaching for her phone to call Jack, but (her mind is caught in the moment where she shares a shadow with a father and a daughter and Garrett Jacob Hobbs says, See? as he slits her throat and it's been years of learning you vs. them. 

No wonder Abigail grabbed on to her and doesn't want to let go)

her mind is stuck replaying on the name Lecter. "He said he wouldn't tell, either. He promised," she says, thoughts skipping as she starts acknowledging why her hallucinations have always taken the form of the stag she saw in his office every time she went. "Abbie, what did he make you promise in return?"

Abigail shudders. "Will, he was the unknown caller," she answers with her voice crackling like light and air suspended in rain clouds during a storm. "He called my dad to say you were - Will? Will? Oh god. What's happening?"

The room flickers, antlers sprouting from the walls before spilling into sand and water and fading altogether. Lecter fits the profile. Lecter is strong enough to lift a grown woman's body and stab it through horns. He made the call, and he has dinner parties where he serves mostly meat, and if he's been manipulating Abbie than he's been manipulating her too. Lecter's not just a copycat killer,  _he's the Chesapeake Ripper._

And Will's spent at least five days a week with him for nearly a year. 

She barely registers her own collapse because Abigail somehow managed to get them over to the couch. Garrett Jacob Hobbs manipulated her and then tried to kill her and she's Lecter's Abbie. Her hallucination was a stag, which means on some level she must've known it, but she just tried so damn hard to deny it and now -

 

-

 

Will wakes up in the hospital and instantly panics, trying to sit, but hands grab at her arms before she can make it far. She twists, mind turning inward as she feels the stag staring at her from an unseen vantage point and almost bumps noses with Alana. 

"I need you to calm down, Will," she says, voice even and strong over the flurry of noise of fast beeping monitors and her own heartbeat. "You're in the hospital in Baltimore. Jack transferred you here after you passed out in your home."

(Abigail bent over her, reaching for the cell phone next to the light, and I'm calling an ambulance, Will, she said, despite how dangerous that was now that Will knows an -)

"Where's Abbie?" she asks and realizes she's clinging onto Alana and that her whole body hurts. "Where's - what's wrong with my head?"

Alana glances back at the door before explaining almost in one breath, "You have encephalitis, I'm here because someone is trying to frame you for five murderers and the evidence is solid -"

"It's the Ripper."

"What?"

She looks up. "Alana,  _where's Abigail Hobbs?_ "

"They're looking for her," her friend says, sitting on the edge of the bed and not letting go. "Look, Will, the doctors need to put you in a protective coma to treat you -"

"I can -"

"Will, your brain is trying to kill you!"  _Encephalitis_. That's a physical condition, she realizes. A physical condition an MRI should be able to pick up on. "Listen, Jack and the others know you didn't do this. Whoever  _did_ do this apparently didn't take into account some of what we know about you, but there's a lot of evidence against you right now, so before the doctor puts you under, I need you to tell me what you know."

She's about to be put in a medically induced coma and Abigail is missing and she's being framed for murder, which all raise of the question of how long she was out. "Lecter told me there was nothing physically wrong with me," she says. "He showed me a normal brain scan."

"Hannibal?" She nods and all it does is make her head feel worse. "Will, that -"

"Sounds nuts, I know. But he showed me a normal scan, Alana."

Then the same doctor as her last one is there and Will's not finished. Alana turns around and gives her a surprise kiss on the side of her head. "When you wake up, we'll have answers," she tells her, moving away. "I promise, Jack won't let this happen. We'll find Abigail."

She's gone, and Will is faced with the stark reality that for the first time in twelve years, she is genuinely helpless.

 

-

 

[Alana Bloom knows this about Will Graham:

  * she doesn't even have the strength to break through a brick wall, let alone mount a girl on antlers
  * she was raped when she was nineteen, info found via old medical records, and with her attitude towards clothes it's doubtful she would ever strip anyone naked
  * she truly does love Abigail in the only way she knows how
  * she has an eating problem that is not conducive to the  _rest_ of the Ripper's MO



Officially, Alana shouldn't be allowed on this case as her opinion on Will is considered bias, but the same goes for all of them and no one ever comments. Despite the evidence stacked against her and the logical reasoning that her own insanity could be the root of the problem, Will does not and never has fit the murderer's profile. Even with the human remains found in odd places in her house and the strip of Abigail's skin in the sink, there is a distinctly artificial feeling about it. Beverly freaks out on a local Wolf Trap cop within the day for saying something about Will being a murderer and no one ever expecting a thing bad enough that Jack had to tell her to walk it off. In all her years working alongside the FBI, she'd never seen Jack Crawford this angry. After Miriam Lasse, he was just and self-loathing. There's a difference. 

She doesn't like it]

 

-

 

[Searching out Hannibal leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but Jack's willing to do what he has to just to cover all the bases and he doesn't like how quickly Brian and Jim were able to find the late Sutcliffe's real MRI test huddled away in a file cabinet labeled  _Case Studies._ Wilhelmina Graham is written neat across the top and apparently no one else in the office thought to make the connection. Hannibal's not home or at the office when they arrive, but there's a warrant and they let themselves in. It's Beverly who finds the book with notes on their sessions and the badly drawn clocks. Will's been in a critical condition for three days without end and though the book has a chance of being a solid lead, it's still only one thing. 

But then they find Abigail. 

She's alive in the basement of his house, surrounded by the dead and a series of recipes and the whole place looks like a horror show. This is a man he let into his home, he let around his wife, he let  _feed_ -

Well, he's not thinking about that one for now]

 

 

-

[She's unconscious for three weeks. Abigail is awake before the first one is even finished and though she keeps her own secrets, she makes sure Special Agent Crawford and his team know damn well Will never did anything.

Now she has a new scar down the length of her arm to compliment the one across her neck]

 

-

 

On a Tuesday, Will wakes up from her coma (it's what her world seems to consist of, waking up, and not the lazy weekend kind books love the rave about so much) and though nothing ever feels particularly coherent, the team comes to give her to occasional updates anyway. "Your case was dropped before it even started," Katz says, sitting on the edge of her bed side Price and Zeller took the others and they unapologetically leave Jack standing. "I mean, there was evidence, but everyone knew it wasn't you. Or everyone who mattered anyway."

She might not fit the profile of the Chesapeake Ripper or the copycat, but she is a feasible candidate for a murderer. Insanity just does that to a person - or encephalitis mixed with empathy disorder induced insanity, anyway. Jack, though, still seems to be caught in the mindset that she's a kid that needs taking care of, and maybe if she were a man, it would be different. 

Still, she's not finding a particularly compelling argument for complaining about gender roles at the moment. 

"By the time we found Abigail Hobbs, we already had counter evidence," Price adds. She's not allowed to see Abigail until the doctors say she can handle stress. 

"I guess I missed all the excitement, then," she says, looking around at all of them (for a week she couldn't see faces because a murderer couldn't see faces, but her glasses are on and they're all clear and made of imperfect lines and sharp features and she feels more solid than she has in a long time). "Jack, have you - What's going to -?"

(words tangled up inside her stuffing, attempts to unravel in vain and she feels like she's filled with a convoluted mess)

He seems to be able to interpret through the haze of difficulty the medication is causing, though, because he answers, "He's...still at large. You're under protection here, so you're safe."

Realistically, she doesn't think anywhere is safe and he knows it, too. They all do. "Just concentrate on resting up," says Zeller with a forced smile. "Can't have my favorite girl swooning at any more of my crime scenes."

Katz hits him on the back of his head and Will hadn't known people outside of Jack or Alana cared enough to the degree making jokes is appropriate (but it's always easier to like the crazy girl who still has that hint of sanity, she realizes, because all it really means in the end is they can be her knight in shining armor and somehow become friends with their project alone the way.

It's a luxury she wouldn't get if she weren't five two with eyes too wide for her face).

"Visiting hours are almost over," Jack says, closer than before (the doll maker decided on brown curls for her, not straight and blonde, she wants to remind him, but it seems in bad taste) as he prepares for his goodbye. "I think Dr. Michaels commit a murder of his own if I pull my badge to extend my time again."

"I'll be fi - all right on my own," Will says, because she needs to be, but the words aren't untangling inside her head. "Soon? See you - soon, anyway."

"Yeah, tomorrow," he promises. 

Gradually, they all leave. 

She sleeps for another forty-eight hours.

 

-

 

Around the time she regains some form of coherency, Alana shows up with one of her secret smiles. 

"I have a surprise for you," she tells her, but doesn't move into the room. 

Even through the pain medication, Will's head still throbs. "I thought the doctors said those weren't allowed."

"Well, that's why I came to warn you first," Alana answers. "Besides, I have faith in you. Michaels doesn't know you like I do. And someone's been dying to see you."

(blue eyes crying and it was me or them, Will, Abigail says.

Someone else is here, Abigail says. 

They shoot a deer that's antlers cut them deep)

Two minutes later and her murderer, surrogate little sister is breaking every unspoken no touching rule they have, hugging her tight it hurts. "He kept giving me updates," she whispers into Will's shoulder. "He kept saying you'd be arrested because of me."

Will should ask her if she turned herself in, but she doesn't. She absorbed Abigail as surely as she absorbed the girl's father, and she felt the deep-seated survival instinct the first moment they touched. "No one ever suspected me of murder, Abbie," she says, pulling back. "Though I'm sure Alana told you that."

"Alana said you weren't well enough to handle seeing me after thinking I was dead," the girl says as she releases her completely. "I just remember being told you visited me in the hospital when I was in a coma too and I know it was medically induced or whatever, but I thought you weren't going to wake up and it was going to be my fault just like everything -"

"Thinking about it isn't going to get you anywhere," Will says. "You have to shake it off. Take that from someone with a lot of experience."

"You never shook it off, though, did you?"

For Abigail's sake, she ignores that. "Where are you staying?" she asks instead.

(sterile institutions, phone calls begging for a night away in her barely used spare room, scarves no longer worn as the wound steadily fades from pale skin)

"With Alana," she answers. "Told me Dr. Bloom was too long now that we're living together. We're both under federal protection - all of us are - so I guess they figured it's easier to protect a house instead of two full hospitals."

The situation must really be considered serious if Jack is willing to let Abigail off free, whether or not she's no longer a suspect (it was me or them). Now that Will's mind is clearer, even under the effect of medication, she knows the Ripper - Lecter - won't strike again, or at least not blatantly or not for a few years. He may have even skipped country lines. But she doesn't want to think about that now, doesn't want to become someone else even for a few minutes at a time. 

With a small smile, because that feels right, she says, "How about this? When I get out of here, we talk to...people about you moving in with me. If you still want and I'm declared stable enough to handle living with someone who I'm technically the legal guardian of. Then you can still change your name, if you want, and start applying to schools in the area. Unless the entire public thinks I'm a murderer."

"I heard Agent Crawford bribed Freddie Lounds into writing an official article on  _him_ instead of you." Neither of them use his name. "That way people know who he is. And yeah, I'd like that. I never originally applied to schools in Virginia anyway and I don't want to go back."

Because Abigail insists, they start making plans, even though most won't happen because even without the encephalitis, Will's still half crazy and she's not so stable herself. Alana comes back in half an hour later and the girl doesn't notice, but Will does, and she watches her friend smile as Abigail rambles on about watching shitty movies if her homework load gets too much and all this talking is obviously not for her benefit. 

And it's a little weird, really, realizing that after years of everyone acting like she needs to be taken care of, it’s suddenly her job to watch over someone else.

 

-

 

Another two weeks and Will is finally released from the hospital because Jack had used his badge to have all medical decisions signed over to him in case she got the idea in her head to sign out AMA. Her dogs put on quite the show when she returns home, which their cat-loving escort doesn't like all that much, and Abigail sprawls out on the couch with a sense of familiarity like she  _belongs_ there (claiming her territory is what it really is, a predator and prey wrapped into one and if they told the truth early enough, she easily could have plead innocent for assistance under coercion and got off with no penalty besides a damaged reputation) as Alana disappears into the kitchen to make them food. It's going to be  _that_ kind of first day back and she doesn't even bother to hide it. She says that she's still Abigail's psychiatrist, so she'll come around regularly to check on her, but a mixture between Jack's request and friendship means she's coming by to check on Will too. Eating, apparently, is a focal point. For both of them.

Will really isn't surprised. 

"Remember," her friend says before she leaves the next morning, "you have two months off from field work minimum and can quit if you want. My phone's open any time to the two of you. Will, Jack wants me to remind you that his is too and something about bedrock. I'll come by as often as I can."

"We'll be -"

"If you start feeling -"

"The hospital said -"

From the doorway to the once spare bedroom, Abigail says, "Alana, I can work a phone, too," because even though the doctors declared her fit, apparently they're still worried about seizures. According to the book they found, the reason she was always in pain after she regained time was because convulsions made her lose it. "If something happens, I'll call for an ambulance."

Alana gives her a hug before she leaves and in the quiet stillness of her absence, Will and Abigail begin a life together.

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact!: I had encephalitis when I three, which is so obscenely young I was misdiagnosed. If you've never had it, be happy. I was young and small enough that if the doctors hadn't caught the misdiagnosis when they did, I would've died within a week. According to my mom, I kept hallucinating whales.
> 
> I also seized and then forgot chunks of time, so I always kind of figured that's what happened to Will.


End file.
